Santiago, Here I Come! by Perry O'Donovan
 | Since they were originally published in The Southern Star, the newspaper has had so many requests for copies of Perry O’Donovan’s highly-acclaimed articles on walking the ancient pilgrim road to Santiago de Compostela that it has been decided to run them off as a little pamphlet, just published as Santiago, Here I Come! |
At the end of last year, beginning in mid-November near Biarritz in Southwest France (and following Napoleon’s route over the Pyrenees), Perry O’Donovan walked all across Spain to the Medieval pilgrim city of Santiago de Compestela in Galicia (the Spanish province to the north of Portugal), arriving in what has been called ‘the Rome of the West’ just before Christmas Day; altogether the best part of a 1,000 kilometres.
Full moon over Santiago Cathedral the night before Christmas
Santiago and Cape Finisterre are our nearest neighbours to the south, Santiago being directly south of Kinsale and Finisterre—which means ‘end of the earth’—being due south of Baltimore and the Mizen. The walk from the French Pyrenees to the Spanish Atlantic coast is the same as walking from London to Cork, or from London to the Outer Hebrides, or, putting it another way, it is the equivalent of walking from Skibbereen to Belfast and back again.
Asked about his motivation for undertaking such a project Perry said: ‘Coming up to September last year The Southern Star asked me to write something for the 400th anniversary of the ‘Flight of the Earls’. At the time I was rehearsing actors for a production of Brian Friel’s play Making History, which is about Hugh O’Neill and Hugh O’Donnell and Kinsale 1601 and all that.
‘Directly after the fiasco at Kinsale, O’Donnell came down here into West Cork and, from Castlehaven harbour, sailed for Spain; that was the beginning of the exodus of old Gaelic lords from these shores in the seventeenth century, a trickle that became a flood before the century’s end.
‘I was interested in the idea of a long march, always have been—O’Neill and O’Donnell coming down from the North, Napoleon taking his army to Moscow, Mao’s Long March in China, Ghandi walking to the sea to make salt—I’d read that these long walks change you—walking 6 or 8 weeks day after day, 20 or 30 miles every day, carrying everything you need on your back, with minimum rations, and the idea that it’s all mad folly eating away at your innards. Or, rather, not ‘change you’ but reveal who you really are, because everyday you’ll find you leave behind something you don’t actually need (including all the layers of your false self); eventually, you only have the energy and willingness to carry what is truly essential, no excess baggage and no bull.
‘I wanted the actors to walk to Ulster with me, learning the lines for the play and rehearsing on the roads as we went. They thought I’d gone completely bonkers! And they said so, but not so politely.
‘But I was totally serious, and fully meant to do it, with or without them. And then one Saturday morning in the Farmers’ Market in Skibbereen I got talking to one of the stall-holders, Tim Macey from the Mizen (who has a stall selling fancy chocolates), and in the course of our conversation he suggested I walk the pilgrim road to Santiago instead, which, as he said, would be a damn sight warmer (and cheaper) than the road to Tyrone.
‘And then I found out that the West Cork people that had followed O’Donnell down to Galicia—Denis O’Driscoll from Castlehaven, Donal and Philip O’Sullivan Beare, Lady Ellen McCarthy and so on—had, in 1605, established an Irish College in Santiago de Compostela for the education of their children (lest, in exile, their sons, or the sons of their sons, got lost to the homeland); the college, apparently, only just around the corner from the cathedral and still extant (the building at any rate—it’s up for sale at the moment). And that settled it: I was going to walk to Santiago, actors or no actors, money or no money, play or no play.’
Perry O'Donovan at the Irish College, Santiago de Compestela, set up by the West Cork Wild Geese in 1605
The pilgrimage to the tomb of St James the Apostle in Santiago is one of the three great pilgrimages in the Christian tradition (the other two being the pilgrimage to the tomb of St Peter in Rome and the pilgrimage to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem). The five essays Perry wrote describing this epic journey—which read like a good short story (a fabulous two-hour sit)—have attracted praise far and wide: ‘brilliantly-written, funny, moving, profound, and true’, wrote one senior clergyman (someone who himself has made the pilgrimage three times); ‘magnificent … and inspiring’ was the appreciative summation of another three-time Santiago veteran.
One of the many roadside features way-marking the road to Santiago (this one showing St James himself as a pilgrim on the road).
To get your copy of Santiago, Here I come! (only €3.99)
contact the Southern Star at www.southernstar.ie
or at The Southern Star, Ilen Street, Skibbereen
Or from Skibbereen Bookshop, www.skibbereenbookshop.com
Perry O’Donovan was schooled in Ballineen and Dunmanway in the 1970s. Subsequently, in 1980s, he studied history, politics, and sociology at London’s South Bank Polytechnic [University], graduating with first class honours. Graduate school studies (MSc in the history and sociology of scientific knowledge) at Edinburgh University led to his appointment as a researcher at Cambridge University Library, 1992—99, where he worked on 5 volumes of the acclaimed (32-volume) Correspondence of Charles Darwin edition (Cambridge University Press, 1985—2025?). Working as a writer and performer he now lives again in his native West Cork, based in Skibbereen.
