Walking to the Foot of the Sky Author: Miriam MulcahyISBN-13: 978-1804441732Publisher: EriuGuideline Price: €15.99Recently, at the monthly meeting of my book club, a friend mentioned she was off a couple of days later to walk a section of the Camino de Santiago. A second friend smiled: she too was planning to walk part of the Camino in September. There were only five of us, and that two of the five should have independently made such plans was striking – though also of a piece, it seemed to me, with our present moment, when more of us are looking for other meanings in a chaotic world.These circumstances returned to mind as I read Miriam Mulcahy’s superlative account of her walk along the Beara Breifne Way, from west Cork to Cavan. Mulcahy’s account begins in the depths of Covid, with the country hemmed into two-kilometre worlds, and when a return to our expansive lives seemed beyond the imagination. Mulcahy “was stretched and pulled, as taut and thin as any line, as fragile as the edge of a sheet of paper, and could tear at any second”. These sensations of intolerable confinement provided a germ of a thought, the beginning of a beginning – and so a resolution was born.Such an account as this – of a walk, a personal reckoning – requires the strongest of intellectual, emotional and historical foundations to succeed as a narrative. And it requires a clear, pure note of authenticity – the more so, of course, in the aftermath of the controversy that enveloped Raynor Winn’s The Salt Path. It is a pleasure and a satisfaction, then, to find all these crucial ingredients present in abundance in Mulcahy’s account. The historical underpinning is provided by the book’s keen awareness of its antecedents: of the march north from their Beara homeplace of the Gaelic chieftain Domhnall Cam O’Sullivan Beare and his companions, in the opening weeks of 1603, and in the aftermath of defeat at Kinsale. [ Walking the 700km Beara Breifne Way: ‘I wanted to test myself, test my body’Opens in new window ]As Mulcahy walks, she becomes increasingly alive to her own place on a vast tapestry, of her physicality, and of her growing sense of connection and belonging: “Yes, I am chasing history […] but I’m also, I’m starting to realise, following some internal line with myself." This book’s great strength lies in its tracing – with honesty, with curiosity – of this line to its end.Neil Hegarty is an author and critic