They should give everyone off from work and school for days like this!
But amazingly, I can’t see Clare Island
This is the clearest I’ve seen the chapel at the top.
The Chapel is technically an Oratory, a small building set aside for prayer. The word comes from the Latin, orare, which is also the origin of the word for a statue of a praying person, orant.
“In 1905, during the driest and finest summer in living memory,” 15 local men, including one Charles O’Malley of Westport, built the oratory in 4 months. All of the concrete and materials had to be carried up, usually by donkey, but sometimes on the backs of the men.
Water to mix in the cement also had to be carried up from the west side of the Reek, again by manpower.
During the four months it took to construct the building, two men stayed in a wooden hut at the top. They were buffeted by winds off the Atlantic and sometimes took turns keeping watch to prevent themselves from being blown down into the Bay below. Each day the other workmen made the 1 to 1 1/2 hour trek up the mountain to bring up food and more materials to the men at the top.
A much better telling can be found in this article from 1940:
‘THE Oratory on the Mountain’, by John C. Boyne,
was published in The Connaught Telegraph
on Saturday, August 3, 1940.
