The purpose here is to draw out the essential importance of time and place in the popularity of the Bodenstown pilgrimages. The time of year was June, the day of the week Sunday. The days stretch out in June; the longest day of all is the 20th or the 21st. Sunday was the only day that was free of labour for ordinary people. A social imperative for Catholics was attendance at Mass before noon. Pilgrimages had therefore to be scheduled between early and late afternoon. This would not have been possible during the month of Tone’s death, November, as daylight soon fades. Another seasonal factor is weather, June being the greenest month, refreshing without being too exhausting for walking; November is bare and depressing. June pilgrimages are very attractive for excursions into the countryside. Weather affects the playing of music by bands. Though June is never entirely free of rain, it is seldom damp underfoot for a long period, nor is it insufferably cold. It is usually warm and dry enough for enjoyable walking, for picnicking and for standing about at the cemetery or assembly field, necessary stages of the pilgrimage.
Place, equally, was of essential importance. The proximity of Bodenstown to a railway station on the main Dublin–Cork line made it easy for pilgrims from the metropolis to reach Tone’s grave. Trains travelling non-stop the 30km from Dublin to Sallins took 31 minutes. Usually they were ‘specials’ put on by the Great Southern and Western Railway Company for the exclusive use and convenience of Bodenstown pilgrims. The half-hour walk from Sallins railway station was just the right distance for men and women in good health: not so long that it brought exhaustion, not so short that it prevented comradeship and bonding among the walkers. The road from Sallins to the turn for Bodenstown, part of the road from Naas (the county town of Kildare) to Clane and on to other places in the north of the county, was not a trunk road. The road from the turn to the graveyard is described in contemporary sources as a ‘boreen’, and even in our own day it has very little traffic. Bodenstown was never a nuclear village; its churchyard was and remains surrounded by open fields, a sequestered place.
Not all pilgrims travelled by train from Dublin. As early as 1892 the Freeman’s Journal reported several groups starting in ‘brakes’ from the National Club premises in Rutland Square, and others travelling on bicycles. A ‘brake’ was typically a four-wheeled carriage, with low sides but no roof, drawn by two horses, its passengers seated facing each other on two long benches—a pleasant, companionable means of transport in good weather. Bicycles were more comfortable after 1890 with the invention of pneumatic tyres, and after 1900 the ‘free wheel’. Bodenstown was not too far. Sallins is 32km distant by the Cork road. There were no steep hills. Bicycles became very popular. In June 1917 ‘some hundreds of cyclists’ descended on Bodenstown; they were, the Leinster Leader reported, ‘a feature of the day’. In 1918 an increase in train fares and fine weather on the day of the pilgrimage were said to be factors in a large proportion of the 2,000 pilgrims travelling from the metropolis deciding to make the journey by bicycle. In June 1920, during the War of Independence, the Irish Times reported how ‘a large party of members of Volunteers’—a body dominated by the IRB—‘left Dublin on bicycles’, forming up in Rutland Square and going off to Bodenstown ‘in military formation on the command of the officers in charge’.
Pilgrims travelling from villages around could of course travel on foot, in smaller horse-drawn vehicles or on bicycles. The names of these places recur in the newspaper reports: Clane, Prosperous, Ardclough, Celbridge, Maynooth, Kilcock, Sallins itself, Naas and (beyond Naas) Newbridge, by then expanding on account of the military camp at the Curragh.