One day, a few weeks ago, I was on my way home from work and for the first time since I started The Job, it wasn’t raining. I looked over to my left and nearly swerved off the road.

I could see Croagh Patrick! It was backlit with the sunset and was just gorgeous, a perfect pyramid in the distance. I only had my iPhone, and it was a Thursday so I didn’t have time to try to stop and take pictures, or even go home and come back with our proper camera. I didn’t even know where I could pull off the road. So I bucketed on toward home regretfully.

Every day since on my way home I look for The Reek. Clouds, clouds, clouds… did I imagine seeing it? Surely that glorious moment couldn’t have been my imagination. But nothing, no sign of a mountain in the distance, and definitely not one of such perfect angular shape. I couldn’t find the spot where I’d seen him (I’ve decided a mountain named Patrick has to be a male), either – there was just no sign of it at all.

On Tuesday, I thought (for the first time, I can be a little slow) to look for Croagh Patrick on the way in to work. it wasn’t cloudy, shockingly enough, and lo!- I found him, at a point on the road much closer to Knock than I had originally thought.

Ah-ha, I thought, I’ve got you now!

All the rest of this week I’ve been slowing down and looking, hoping for another sunset behind Ireland’s Holy Mountain. No, I’m not religious, but it is what it is – the biggest, pointiest thing around and where Patrick is meant to have fasted for forty days in 441AD. Of course he picked the place because it is unique in appearance and had been considered special to the Irish long before Christianity existed – about 3,000 years before. Here’s the Wikipedia link if you want to learn more.

Anyhoo, this Thursday I got my chance, sort of. It wasn’t a perfect sunset by any means, and the sun no longer sets directly behind the mountain. But I whipped the Mini into the other lane and backed up into a cow-track, jumped out and took a few shots with my phone. *Edit – I forgot to say that a drive from Knock to the Reek is about 60km (37mi) – and as the crow flies it is probably about 50km (30mi) away.

Hipstamatic again, zoomed in. I had it on black and white still. The colour Hipstamatic shots I took aren’t worth posting.

Regular iPhone camera, but heavily mucked around with back at home. What I saw with my eyes just didn’t come through on ‘film.’ Very disappointing – but I’m still putting this up because I’m now taking the ‘real’ camera to work with me in hopes of catching what I really see.