There’s a framed photograph on the wall of Davy Leane’s kitchen that hints at the mystery of the peak that looms above his home in mid-Kerry.
In the picture, Leane and a few others are on top of Carrauntoohil, the country’s tallest mountain, part of a group who back in 2020 were carrying out one of the periodic repaintings of the cross that stands at the summit, 1,039 metres up.
But in the photo, taken by Leane’s son and with all the participants hazy against the backdrop, strange lines appear to hover around him, almost like in a cartoon.
“That evening, I got a pain in my chest,” Leane (52) explains over tea and biscuits.
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“We were going up painting the cross on top of Carrauntoohil, during Covid, four or five of us. And I got a pain in my chest, five or six times, from the top of the Ladder,” he says, referring to the Devil’s Ladder, part of the approach on the mountain.
“And I took no notice of it.”
A week later, he climbed the mountain again to gather his sheep, and again felt the pain “every 100 yards or so”.
Back home a few days later, after shearing the sheep, the tingling came up the arm – “And I still said nothing.”
He went to hospital in Tralee, passed all the tests but caved on the walking machine, with a doctor – convinced there was something serious wrong – dispatching him to Cork by ambulance. He subsequently had a stent fitted.
“And when I see the force,” he says, referring back to those strange lines in the photograph, “I ask: what is that around me?”
A neighbour took the photo to a fortune teller in Limerick.
“He said: ‘Is he still alive?’ That’s the first thing he said.”
Leane is indeed alive and well and able to talk a mile a minute. He is the fifth generation of a family living and working near Ireland’s tallest mountain, someone who is intimately familiar with its trails and aspects.
But these days, he’s also part of a growing number of people scaling Carrauntoohil, and for a variety of reasons.
That more people have been climbing the peak – and the Reeks generally – has been well documented, as has the likelihood that this places greater pressure on services such as Kerry Mountain Rescue, who are charged with helping those who get into difficulty.
Gerry Christie, a long-time member of Kerry Mountain Rescue, got a bit of a knock doing a sliding tackle the previous night when playing football with his young nephew. It seems the mountains keep Christie young – he’s 72.
Originally from Meath but well acquainted with the terrain of the Reeks, Christie says it takes an average of seven hours to go up and down the mountain, but the times can vary. The profile of those climbing the mountain has changed, he says, from members of climbing clubs to pretty much anyone and everyone.
When it comes to those getting into difficulty, it’s a similar story, though Christie says experienced and well-prepared climbers can get into greater difficulty, but less often, whereas the more inexperienced climbers may simply lose their bearings or go over an ankle.
John Cronin, current co-ordinator of Kerry Mountain Rescue and owner of the nearby Cronin’s Yard, from where many groups depart for the summit, says that as of mid-July this year there had been 35 call-outs to Kerry Mountain Rescue, which represents a slight increase on previous years.
Cronin, another fifth-generation local, recalls with a sense of wonder a time he was dealing with a mountaineer in full regalia who had sustained a serious injury, only for the rescuers to be passed by another man descending the mountain in his bare feet.
Fatalities are rare, but not unknown. Christie points out that even on a nice day it can be 10 degrees cooler at the top, but not everyone is adequately prepared.
“They don’t listen,” he says about some of those who take on Carrauntoohil.
“You’re banging your head off a stone wall. Being up there as a guide on a fine summer’s day, I’m stunned what people get away with, but I also think at this stage that there’s always sufficient guided parties, and there’s our people who kind of have an aura that they know what they’re about.”
Anyone joining the mountain rescue team has to have “the right stuff”, not least calmness under pressure.
He believes similar qualities are required of those seeking to take on Carrauntoohil and who find the going tough: they should know when to turn back.
The Coffee Pot cafe near Beaufort is one of the businesses doing a solid lunchtime trade as cars and buses full of visitors plan their next move.
Behind the counter, Laura O’Sullivan, originally from the north side of Cork city, says visitor numbers have been brisk but she has not, and will not, climb the mountain herself.
“No, it’s not my cup of tea,” she says.
“I climbed the Comeraghs when I was in college and it was bad. It was horrendous.”
Leane has concerns over the sheer number of people climbing it these days, meaning shortcuts and grooves have been etched into its face, instead of the old zigzag approaches.
He recalls the late 1980s when “the guiding of tourists started on the reeks and it was like Neil Armstrong landing on the moon, as if they were the first humans to land on Carrauntoohil”.
“They invented new place names and created new paths and today we have the erosion of the mountain physiology and the disregard – [the] erasing of its hundreds of old Irish place names.”
He can list off those place names on Carrauntoohil, trails and gullies that he himself still regularly climbs, watching the sheep.
Just a few months ago a video clip posted by a photographer captured Leane skilfully descending a steep aspect of the mountain – it got 9,000 likes on Instagram and 178,000 views, a currency he doesn’t particularly value but which prompts him to joke: “I was almost viral.”
Cathal Fitzgerald’s family owns some of the mountain. Fitzgerald (29) is in the fourth year of a “Covid project”, namely his coffee hut perched at the Lisleibane car park.
He says the first 45 minutes of the walk is on his father’s land. Such is the growth in his clientele, he says, he is going to close only in November and then reopen for Christmas.
“What a lot of people give out about now is, even though you can walk it, it’s the erosion that’s happening up there,” he says. “There are places such as the Devil’s Ladder, we hear from everybody, and it’s the most popular route, and the erosion actually makes it less walkable.”
He believes more funding is required for maintenance of paths, and that some sort of charge could be applied in future to help pay for it.
According to Leane, it is only in recent years that farmers in the area have acquired an insurance package that gives them some indemnity in the event of someone injuring themselves.
But as Fitzgerald says, the visitors come and go but the local bonds endure.
His “absolute favourite thing” is “how the community bands together”, he says.
At Cronin’s Yard, which as John Cronin explains, started as a drinks vending machine and expanded to the extensive tea rooms of today, the scout troop has made its way down.
Leaders Dan Smyth and Hannah Geraghty say some of the group found the climb challenging, even though many had previous experience of bigger climbs.
But Smyth says other climbers seemed to have a different approach.
“The thing that surprised me was the lack of preparation,” he says, referring to the lack of appropriate kit.
Or as Geraghty put it: “Some people looked like they were going to their local park.”
There might well be an explanation for the eerie lines around Davy Leane in the 2020 photo, most likely a Brocken spectre, where person’s magnified shadow is projected on to mist or cloud.
Yet it’s hard not to feel drawn towards some kind of mystical explanation. It’s the kind of thing that keeps drawing people back.
The number of people making the journey up Croagh Patrick on traditional Reek Sunday has fallen, yet climbing Carrauntoohil has become a type of secular pilgrimage.
Or as Christie puts it: “The mountains are my cathedral and they have added much to my life – it’s an honour, if not a duty, to put a little back.”
Smyth and Geraghty are asked how, when you’ve climbed Ireland’s tallest mountain with a group this young, you could top that achievement.
To which the response is: “Do it again.”
