Going wild in the Comeragh's
I'm not sure if you've heard of the Comeragh's wild festival, I hadn't up until a few weeks ago. But it happens around now every year and its a series of events in the comeraghs to get people out into the countryside. Some of the highlights include guided nature walks, a chance to watch a movie up by mahon falls and my Saturday night plans the hike up to Coumshingaun lake to watch Lackendara Jim.
The Lackendarra Jim tickets cost €20 for the walk and play or you had the option of paying €50 to camp up there. For a camping ticket they provided sleeping bags and mats plus you arrive at the campsite to find tents already assembled and some basic food, tea etc is also covered in the cost. It was all organized by Mountain zone with the play by rigout productions and music by Jordans Rigout.
Now I am going to be honest here and say I was pretty reluctant about the whole thing. I was cajoled into going by himself, always looking for a new experience. I like watching plays so it wasn't that, that put me off and I also quite like walks even up mountains but I wasn't overly enthused about doing it at night with the possibility of inclement weather. I did come round eventually and I'm glad I did or I'd have missed out on a fantastic one off opportunity.
We had to meet at Rathgormack hiking centre at 6 and we arrived prepared. Stephen had a warm jumper, rain jacket, scarf and borrowed runners and I had a full picnic in a backpack, a new rain jacket and many layers of clothes plus a tiny but powerful torch for the way back down. We soon discovered the 6pm meeting was to give everyone plenty of time to find the place which is good because it took me much longer than I thought. We were both starved at this stage so we had most of the picnic in my car. I might have been a bit too enthusiastic because I ate my spelt roll so quickly that I actually gave myself a bit of headache.
After everyone had been accounted for we drove a few miles down some winding roads to find the car park where everyone was gathered and after a quick safety talk we started making our way through the woods. There must have been over 100 of us if not more. We had several guides to make sure none of us got lost and that we all arrived relatively intact.
It was a beautiful walk up and we would stop every now and again for the group to stay together giving us a chance to take in the breathtaking views and catch our breaths. By the time I was half way up I felt fully certain I would have calves of steel upon waking up Sunday morning ( I was correct) . It took us about 40 minutes to get to the campsite but there was a still a good bit of the group who hadn't arrived yet so we made ourselves comfortable, I laid out my jacket to sit down on and then we used my backpack as a pillow much to the amusement of the others around us. I'm not sure if it was because it showed us up as newbies that we were to this sort of thing or because we had so quickly gotten that comfortable in our surroundings.
Not long after once the whole group was together we were allowed to walk the final few yards to the lake where the stage was. I mean stage in the loosest sense as we were up the comeragh's. The actor playing Lackenadara Jim was standing by a campfire on the mountainside with two other actors and the musicans a little higher up the mountain. The set was basic enough, a campfire and some lights and a full sound system to get around the difficulty of the audience hearing above the mountain winds. We all settled onto lower grounds, Stephen and I picked a rock to sit on and tried to make ourselves as comfortable as possible.
The story of Lackendara Jim is a true story about a hermit that lived in the comeraghs until the late 1940's. He had a tough life, his parents left him in the care of his grandparents as an infant to emigrate to America and he never heard from his parents again. He enlisted in the army once he was of age and saw a lot of horror and suffering in the great war. When he came home from the war both his grandparents had died and he had no family left. This is when he took to walking in the Comeraghs eventually settling in a cave in the mountainside and modifying it a little so it was somewhat more hospitable. He lived there fairly content for 40 years, only coming down to a nearby village every 2 weeks to have a few drinks, collect his pension and pick up some supplies. This went on until the winter of 1947 when he had to be hospitalised and he died a twelve years later.
It's only when you know the story that you realise how perfect the setting was. The story was told in english with bits of Irish (which admittedly I struggled to understand). The actor playing Jim had the only speaking role and the two others silently moved about helping to set the scene as he told his life story and making great use of the limited props they had available. This was all accompanied by music during key scenes and it really made the play.
There was something quite beautiful about sitting on the side of mountain watching a play in the dark with only flickering lights to illuminate it. The icy wind was less beautiful and I wished I had brought more clothes and perhaps a cushion because my ass was completely numb from the hour of sitting on a rock. We were pretty lucky with the weather as we had cloudy skies that later cleared up but not a drop of rain. When you looked up you could see the whole sky alight with stars.
Afterwards we gathered ourselves and our torches and slowly made our way down the mountain again. Watching the procession of torches going down the winding path made for quite the magical sight. We made it down in about the same time it took us to get up, a fact that I am pretty pleased about given how dark it was but unfortunately it took us a lot longer to get home because a lot of dark country roads look the same. After an hour of driving through every village in county Waterford we did eventually make it back to the city to collapse into bed.
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