Hill, history, myth and adventure

Mount Brandon. Standing 952 m high on the edge of Europe, from the top on a clear day you can see all the way to America. Well, almost. St Brendan the Navigator thought he could. Allegedly he climbed this hill before setting off in a leather coracle, sometime around 530 AD, for the Isles of the Blessed. Or Paradise. Or, as many people have believed since, possibly the North American continent. In the 1970s one believer, Tim Severin, a sequential re-creater of ancient voyages, built his own coracle out of wood and ox hides, sealed with grease from sheep's wool, and sailed the Brendan 7,250 km from Kerry to Newfoundland. Not proving that St Brendan and his merry band of monks were the first Europeans to set foot in the New World; just that they could have been. 


Mount Brandon. It's not just a hill keeping watch over the Atlantic from green and wild west Kerry. It's a whole story in itself. Now walkers follow a white-posted and crossed pilgrim's track, the Saint's Road, up to a crucifix on the summit, but the wondrous views probably aren't very different to what Brendan looked out over, a millennium and a half ago.