UNSPOILED BEAUTY AND HOLY SPIRITS

These days Dublin is not the “dirty old town” of the Irish love ballad. It is a city of commercial confidence, the trendy young, BMWs and mobile phones. The boomtown of the new Ireland does its best to contradict the tales our grandparents told of Irish want and desolation. Even Frank McCourt’s Limerick, in “Angela’s Ashes” the grayest of Irish towns, is now doing its best to reverse the picture of melancholy, congenital want, hunger in the bone.

It would be churlish of any visitor to want Ireland to retain the picturesque squalor that drove so many immigrants to the New World. Nonetheless, right or wrong, if I’m in Dublin and only have time to visit one other place, the county I head for--across the pleasant midlands and into the western limits--is Mayo, where the old Ireland can be tasted. Though the remaining County Mayo farmers are better off than ever, the chief impact of the new Celtic tiger economy on the area so far seems to be that Dubliners are going there looking for vacation homes on such perches as the awesome cliffs of Achill Island.

Mayo is a county of small market towns, of mountains and bogs. Its coastline is august, and its rivers are sacred to salmon fishermen. There is an exceptional concentration of Stone Age sites. And there are some splendid country estate houses turned into hotels. Ashford Castle, for example, is a lavish 19th century castle built by the Guinness brewery family on the ruins of a more ancient one. It sits on the Galway-Mayo border at Cong and was the site of the classic film “The Quiet Man.” Others are Belleek Castle, which lies in northern Mayo near the county seat of Ballina, and Newport House to the west on Clew Bay. And, of course, the county is studded with genial (and less expensive) bed and breakfasts.

But in Ireland, it’s more the people that influence my journeys there. I have always stayed at Constance Aldridge’s guest house, Mount Falcon Castle, on the Moy River, a stretch of water beloved by salmon fishermen, of whom I am not. Constance is, in fact, English, but came to Mayo “as a child bride” in 1930 and combines her husky voice, her energy, charm and jolliness in a stocky frame that 70 Irish summers as an innkeeper have not depleted.

Mount Falcon Castle sounds grand but is simply one of those “big houses” in which the most prominent landlords of Ireland lived in the 19th century in a land of peasants whose own claim on their rented ground was tenuous and who sometimes brought their discontent to the doors of such houses. Aldridge and her now-departed husband, an enthusiast for salmon fishing and Stone Age mound graves, acquired it for five pounds more than the wrecker offered.

Mount Falcon’s appeal was always its atmosphere--a lived-in country house filled with family heirlooms rather than an intimidating luxury hotel. In the evenings, Constance’s communal dinner table--where Germans, French, Irish, English and Constance herself sat--was stocked with splendid local fare: richly flavored salmon, wonderful beef Wellington, capons done in wine, robust potatoes, much of the produce off her land.

The Continentals come to Mayo to fish, and go off with one of the gillies--a sort of fishing wrangler--for the day. Other guests just move on, since Ireland is dense with things to see, and many of its visitors are never in the same place two nights running. But the Mayo fanciers go out, as my wife, Judy, and I do, walking and exploring. In fact, the stories I tell here are the gleanings of many such day excursions from Mount Falcon, the thought of whose evening table always added valor to such adventures. (Sadly, I learned in recent days that Constance, now 90, has decided to sell Mount Falcon Castle because of advancing age. I can only hope the new owners continue to run it as a country guest house with equal appeal.)

I often seem to find myself in Mayo during a change of seasons, so the prime goal of any visitor to Mayo--to climb the mountain named Croagh Patrick--eluded me for some years because storms and mists concealed it. Croagh (pronounced croak) Patrick is Ireland’s holiest mountain. From its summit, St. Patrick, the Celtic hero who introduced Christianity to Ireland and is known to have cast out the snakes and the toads, spent 40 days fasting and praying. It is astonishing how this mountain, at 2,500 feet, small by the standards of the Alps or the Rockies, dominates the landscape of northern Mayo.

Beyond the charming town of Westport, one of Ireland’s most beautiful, Croagh Patrick rises up over Clew Bay on the Atlantic with the authority of a mountain six times its size. It is atmospheric; it is a presence. Like the Indians of North America, the ancient Irish were animist and believed in a spirit-inhabited landscape. Those of us with Irish peasant or small-farmer ancestors can be pretty sure that they, too, harbored a sense of Ireland of the spirits, of holy stones and wells, of “little people.”

So, once you leave mountain-based Campbell’s Pub and pass the snack van eternally parked at the bottom of the mountain, your feet come up against the penitential stones of the ascent, and there is the same strong sense of spiritual surroundings as one might feel in Arizona’s Canyon de Chelly or in the sacred landscapes of central Australia.

Pilgrims, reproducing Patrick’s journey on the mountain, climb it on what they call Domhnach Chrom Dubh’s, or Chrom Dubh’s Sunday, the last Sunday of July. On clear days the ascent offers increasingly exhilarating views out over Clew Bay, and one believes the old saying that, looking west from the top, one can see North America.

The mountain’s final steep climb, reached after a good tramp of two hours--unless one is a pilgrim doing penance for his sins and attends to the full range of prayers and devotions on the way up--is a slippery cone of tumbled scree. This final challenge is a little intimidating, with nothing but stone and sky. To keep going on from here, I had to remind myself that women from Dublin and rural Ireland, in skirts and unsuitable shoes, have made this ascent by the thousands year after year.

From this point, the not particularly discernible track upward is called Casan Phadraig, Patrick’s Track. Near the summit lie the ruins of an ancient chapel called Patrick’s Church, and here the pilgrims walk around the peak 15 times, a distance of two miles in itself (the circling of certain sacred stones has its roots in Celtic rites). A plain, modern chapel stands on the summit, but also the low-slung Leaba Phadraig, St. Patrick’s Bed, a penitential mound of stones. Here seven further circuits are made, and a further seven a little to the west, at three mounds of stones called St. Mary’s Cemetery. To the genuine pilgrim, the climb and the stone-circling constitute a rugged day indeed--something to test the merely aerobic.

One day I went up well enough in hiking boots, thinking of myself only in the vaguest sense as a pilgrim. But Patrick took care of that, sending me down as a penitent. A hundred yards from the top, the sole came off my boot. Flapping and threatening to trip me up, it had to be ripped off, and I came down limping on sharp-edged quartz. It was a warning against sneering, against making over-smart connections between Irish belief in inhabited stones, Christianity and St. Patrick.

Later, on the way back to Dublin, in reverence to Judy’s Irish convict great-grandmother, who had been shipped to Dublin before her big journey to Australia, I sank my utterly biodegradable boots in a broad stretch of the Shannon River, returning, I suppose, a bit of Australia home. Ireland brings out a sense of the ritual in visitors.

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On a recent visit to mayo, one bright day after a fierce storm, I went out to climb another mysterious hill, Nephin. Only a couple of hundred feet higher than Croagh Patrick, Nephin rises out of hilly farmland on the other side of Lough Conn (lough is Irish for lake) from Mount Falcon Castle. As frequently happens in Ireland, it is hard for a stranger to locate where a hiking trail begins. I stopped at a farm to ask. A middle-aged woman emerged at the kitchen door and gave me instructions. But, as also frequently happens in Ireland, she gave me a story.

It is perhaps too stereotypical to say that any conversation in western Ireland could be turned into a short story, but this one could have been. The farmer’s wife told me that she didn’t originally come from this part of Mayo and that when she was courting with the man who became her husband, the inheritor of the farm at whose door I now stood, she had come from afar for an Easter holiday wearing a pair of red shoes to celebrate her love and the turning of the season.

But she found to her horror that everyone in Mayo traditionally climbs Nephin the day after Easter, and she talked of her struggle to get to the top, with all of her boyfriend’s kinswomen looking askance at her fancy shoes and speculating that there was no chance this alien hussy could make it. But love and the red shoes prevailed by a narrow margin. Now when she goes up Nephin, she goes in the ordinary, rough shoes of a long farm marriage.

I found on my ascent that day, as on many others, that Nephin is really a waterfall disguised as a hill in furze, bracken, heath and stone. Soon, in this lovely country, I was wet to the waist, and then to the shoulders. The Irish nuns who had spoken of the Emerald Isle in my drought-stricken Australian childhood had not told me the reason for its intensely green coloration: Ireland is a sponge for the Atlantic’s sometimes torrential but always present moisture. This time I abandoned Nephin to its Gaelic demigods and came down to the little village of Beltra, where an old man in a grocery-pub gave me a precise rundown on that morning’s votes for Irish presidential candidates.

Those who come to Mayo for pilgrimages probably don’t leave their devotions merely to Croagh Patrick. In the summer of 1879, in the small eastern Mayo village of Knock, its population reduced by famine and immigration and preoccupied with the struggle against the landlords (known as the Land Wars), the Virgin Mary appeared at the village church.

No fewer than 15 villagers, between 6 and 75 years old, claim to have beheld her. This apparition is the reason a huge modern basilica, Our Lady Queen of Ireland, rises out of Irish farmland by the side of the N17 road running north into County Sligo. Nearby is a Lourdes-like grotto in which the calipers and crutches left behind by the cured lie on display behind a glass wall. Similarly surprising to behold is the local international airport rising out of farmland. Jets from Dublin and France land here, disgorging salmon fishermen and sick pilgrims, to whom the local hotels and bed-and-breakfasts supply accommodation.

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The salmon-rich Moy river flows through Ballina and into Killala Bay. Here, many Irish but few others visit the long, beautiful strand of Enniscrone, a seaside village of ice cream shops and B&Bs; that sits low beneath a line of sand dunes and along wind-combed ridges of salty grass. On the other side of the bay is the little town of Killala, which claims to have been founded by St. Patrick and whose round tower is part of an early cathedral. Killala is worth spending a lot of time in. On this coast, down delightful, though confusing, little lanes, lie the ruins of a number of abbeys destroyed in the 16th century. The omnipresent Atlantic would have served the monks as a splendid metaphor for God, and the ruins of Moyne Abbey and Rosserk resound with the sea’s murmur. Around this area one begins to see memorials dedicated to the landing of a French army in 1798.

France’s aim was to assist Irish rebels, inspired by the American and French revolutions, to put an end to British misrule in Ireland. Hence the Killala monument to French Gen. Jean-Joseph-Amable Humbert. And near the Killala Bay fishing village of Kilcummin stands an eloquent modern sculpture of a French soldier attempting to succor a fallen Irish rebel. The ultimate failure of the joint operations of Gen. Humbert and the rebels ended the Irish uprising. A misused peasantry faced more misuse and was left in a primitive economic condition to face the great Irish Famine half a century later.

A magnificent coastline begins beyond Killala, as the main road skirts the cliffs. Above a splendid beach is the great promontory of Downpatrick Head. The Atlantic is brutal here--it has separated off a column of stone, grassy on top and populated by thousands of birds. The north Mayo coastline is a wonderful place for antiquarians and archeologists. It was thickly populated in the Stone Age, and some of the older settlements and remains can be visited. Particularly the utterly fascinating Ceide Fields.

Ceide Fields is reputed to be the oldest fenced farmland yet discovered in the Western world. It is the remains of a large settlement of people who grew wheat and barley and kept cattle 5,000 years ago. The foundations of its stone fences and houses stand on impressive cliffs, with another bird-infested rock called Don Briste just offshore. A pyramidal glass interpretive center has been erected here to symbolize that the human occupation of Ceide (pronounced KAY-gey) is older than the pyramids.

Beyond it are the remains of a sophisticated society swallowed so thoroughly by bog over the centuries that the official claim is that they were not discovered until the early 1980s. I had the honor some years ago to meet Seamus Caulfield, curator of Ceide and son of the schoolteacher who first made the public aware of this Stone Age settlement. Caulfield said the people of Ceide Fields were a model for Ireland. Here, five millenniums ago, between what Caulfield has found to be low walls--a sign of social tranquillity--a community raised livestock and tended well-ordered crops of grain. No doubt they had their harrowing diseases and darknesses of the soul, but I never go up to Ceide Fields without admiring the competence, sociability and courage of my species, and feeling that perhaps what happened here was more benign than the human attrition of pyramid-building in other places.

Another spot in this corner of Ireland that I always try to go to is the Mullet Peninsula, and I’m not absolutely sure why. Belmullet, at the entrance to the peninsula, is a plain little market town. Erris Head, jutting into the Atlantic in the north, has some fine cliffs, as does Blacksod Point, and there is an ancient fort at Doonamo Point.

But, ultimately, my fascination comes from the Mullet’s being the last of Ireland, an appendix of earth and bog under siege from the sea and barely attached to the mass of Mayo by a narrow neck. Since its natives were so far from any stores or government institutions, inadequate as those were, they were among the first and worst hit when the vampire mold Phytophthora infestans attacked their potatoes in the autumn of 1845.

The peasantry began dying in the spring of 1846, and in 1847 news came through to Dublin that the Mullet people could no longer depend on fish, since they had sold their nets and boats to buy cornmeal to get through the winter. Here forgotten Ireland died. Even as some friends sat with us one day in a golf course clubhouse, looking across the gale-swept greens at Curraun Point, we, perhaps more than the positive-minded, modern, golfing Irish, find it easy to discern the cry of hunger on the Atlantic wind.

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Down the coast, via the town of Bangor and a charming road, the N59, a visitor can approach another region of formerly forgotten Ireland. This is Achill Island. From the little town of Mulrany, the best path to take to Achill runs around the south shore of the Curraun Peninsula, where a shoreline of slanting stone sweeps down from mountains. And exactly where one might expect to find such a monument, there is a memorial cairn (a pile of stones) to one of the Spanish ships of the Great Armada wrecked here between merciless sea and merciless coast in 1588.

Then, over a causeway in Achill Sound, you enter the island. On the Achill shore lie the ruins of a small castle belonging to Granuaile, or Grace O’Malley, the elected chieftain of this area in the 16th century. Ruins associated with her Gaelic dominance are frequently encountered in Mayo. From the remains of Rockfleet Castle near Newport, to Achill, to Clare Island (today a scuba-diving center), one encounters Grace’s presence everywhere.

It is believed that in Achill she slung a chain across the sound to ensure that passing ships paid a toll. Born in 1530, when Gaelic chieftains were under political pressure to yield allegiance to Henry VIII or lose their land, she maintained an independence that, in English eyes at least, was associated with piracy. Now her ruined castles lie on the Mayo shores like broken lutes.

Achill is a test for those with vertigo. It has some of the highest cliffs in Europe--they are dark, monumental and rigorously vertical. But it has wonderful beaches, too: Keem, and Keel Bay, two of what the Irish call Blue Flag (that is, premier) beaches. Above Keel Bay tower the prodigious cliffs of Minaun, and beyond Keem, Croaghaun Mountain seems to have been split in two to tumble 2,000 feet down, in collaboration with the Atlantic to intimidate the soul.

Achill Island is the place that most awes me in Ireland. When I take the coast road, avoiding the black-faced sheep that seem to prefer to sleep on the roads, and come over a hill to see abandoned cottages on murderous, unrelenting cliffs, I feel that rare exhilarating terror of a landscape inhuman in scale. In the middle of the island lies a fascinating deserted village named Slievemore. The village was abandoned about 1900; it too was something of a victim of famine and immigration. It may also have been abandoned in part because of the work of a Protestant evangelist named the Rev. Nangle, who proselytized too zealously here during the famine and whose name is retained in bitter memory. But it is a site that has been continuously occupied for 5,000 years, and is a working archeological dig.

But there are more recent and habitable cottages on the island that await the return of missing islanders from Dublin, Britain and the United States. If the abandonment of houses is an emblem of Irish history, the desire of prosperous Dubliners to snap them up is expressive of the new, more affluent Irish Republic. It is no accident that Irish land reform emerged in 1879 in impoverished Mayo, the creation of a former political prisoner called Michael Davitt.

A Mayo man evicted with his parents from a family farm, Davitt worked in the mills of Lancashire, where, still a child, he lost an arm to a machine. He is buried in his birthplace, Strade, south of Foxford, and his grave provides his own remarkable layer of meaning to the landscape of Mayo. Westport was the scene of great land reform agitation, and the people of Mayo enthusiastically took up the cause of civil disobedience, which came to be known as a boycott after Capt. Charles Boycott, an English land agent who refused to lower tenant farmer rents and became the first landlord to experience farmers’ refusal to supply labor and harvest crops.

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These days, a traveler going to County Mayo can prepare for the trip on the Internet, where one can take a virtual tour of Croagh Patrick on the computer screen. But will Web sites and Dublin affluence eradicate the sense of antiquity, of old Ireland, that Mayo still offers? Naturally, we don’t want Mayo to stand still merely for the tourist’s convenience. But the presences in this landscape are centuries deep. And it’s my suspicion that Mayo will need more than a few Web sites to exorcise them.

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Guidebook: Forgotten Ireland

Telephone numbers and prices: The country code for Ireland is 353. Local numbers below include County Mayo area codes (which must be preceded by a zero when dialing from within Ireland). All prices are approximate and are computed at a rate of .78 Irish pounds to the dollar. Hotel rates are for a double room for one night. Restaurant prices are for dinner for two, food only, unless otherwise noted.

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Getting there: Aer Lingus has nonstop flights from Los Angeles to Dublin, and Delta and Continental have connecting service. There is train and bus service from Dublin to Ballina, but the best way to tour County Mayo is by car; most major rental agencies are represented in Dublin. From Dublin, County Mayo is best reached on the N4 and N5 highways, about a four-hour drive. North Mayo is, at most, a three-hour drive from Ireland’s other major airport, Shannon, to which Aer Lingus flies nonstop from New York City. There are also flights from Dublin to Knock airport.

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Where to stay: In Ballina, Belleek Castle, telephone 96-22400, fax 96-71750, https://www.belleekcastle.com, features a 16th century baronial hall and armor display. Rate: $183. In Cong, opulent Ashford Castle, tel. (800) 346-1001 or local 92-46003, fax 92-46260, https://www.ashford.ie. was built for the Guinness brewing family in 1873 and has 83 bedrooms, a nine-hole golf course, flower gardens, lake and river fishing. Rates: $424 to $500. In Newport, north of Westport on Clew Bay, Newport House, tel. 98-41222, fax 98-41613, https://www.relaischateaux.fr/newport, is an old estate house with a good restaurant. Rate: $205.

Two scenic islands in Clew Bay are worth spending the night on. On Achill Island, Gray’s Guesthouse in Dugort, tel. 98-43244, is a family-friendly inn on the beach. Rate: $115. On Clare Island (a ferry ride from Roonagh Quay west of Westport), Clare Island Lighthouse, tel. 98-45120, fax, 98-45122, https://homepage.eircom.net/~clareislandlighthous, is a restored 19th century lighthouse on a 387-foot cliff. Rate: $115.

One of the charms of Ireland are the excellent and less-expensive bed and breakfasts that stud the countryside. The Irish Tourist Board’s Web site (see below) has extensive listings of B&Bs.;

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Where to eat: I doubt Mayo people would resent my saying that fine dining is not the chief point of visiting their county. Food quality varies from excellent or serviceable to stodgy. One of the best-known restaurants is in Westport: Quay Cottage, tel. 98-26412, is elegant, with dishes based on fresh local fish and meat; $51.

For more information: Irish Tourist Board, 345 Park Ave., New York, N.Y., 10154; tel. (800) 223-6470 or (212) 418-0800, fax (800) 748-3739, https://www.ireland.travel.ie or https://www.irelandvacations.com.