The Ulster-Scot

S P E C I A L S A I N T PAT R I C K ’ S D AY 2 0 2 2 S U P P L E M E N T

PATRICK

ULSTER’S SCOTTISH SAINT

RED I S CO VERI N G ST PAT RI CK

T E M P L E PATR IC K , C O. D OWN : S T PAT R I C K ' S L A N D IN G

PAT R I C K : IN HIS OWN WORDS

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TH E AN CI EN T W O RL D : A VE RY DI FFEREN T PL A C E

ON C OM M ON G R OU N D : PAT R IC K ’ S S C OT T IS H S T ORY

PAT R I C K ’ S SCOTTISH PLACES

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Wednesday March 16 2022

Rediscovering Saint Patrick Ulster is a cultural meeting place, unique in the British Isles as a space where Irish, Scots and English people and identities have coexisted and coalesced. The narrow sea between Ulster and Scotland – just 12 miles at the nearest point – has always served as a bridge more than a barrier, carrying people and ideas between the two places and making the Scottish influence particularly strong. “History and geography,” in the words of Professor Finlay Holmes, “have combined to make Ulster as much a Scottish as an Irish province.”

While the society we know today is very much the product of events in the Seventeenth Century – when the UlsterScots emerged as a distinct people – and developments since, that is by no means the whole story. For millennia before that the peoples of these islands were living together and influencing each other – diverse yet interdependent. These older interactions set the scene and provided the context for what came later. There is no better example than Patrick, the man who brought Christianity to Ireland. Born and raised on the banks of the Clyde, he was kidnapped as a youth and brought to Ulster as a slave. Six years later he escaped and found his way home, only to return and bring the good news of Christianity to his former captors, changing this place forever.

For centuries, it was well known and accepted across these islands that Ireland’s Patron Saint was born on the banks of the Clyde and that his story was a shared one.

However, over the past hundred years or so, this once-familiar knowledge has declined, to the extent that even some of the most acclaimed recent writing about Patrick has missed or dismissed it. Sadly, a prolonged period of conflict also saw Patrick’s story and his commemoration reflected through a modern lens, which has tended to divide rather than unite.

To mark this year’s annual celebration of Patrick, the Ulster-Scots Agency has produced a new publication – Patrick, Ulster’s Scottish Saint – which aims to bring those centuries-old Ulster-Scottish traditions to a new audience and show people the extent to which they were widely-known and shared just a few generations ago. Hopefully, by looking beyond the now ubiquitous shamrocks, shillelaghs and green beer and back to the once well-known and well shared traditions that surrounded Patrick, we can contribute to a better and more shared cultural future, where people of all cultural identities can celebrate the life and legacy of Patrick, Ulster’s Scottish Saint.

This special Saint Patrick’s Day edition of The Ulster-Scot provides a flavour of just some of the stories that are covered in the new booklet, and we hope that it will encourage you to get your hands on a copy, which is available free of charge from the Discover Ulster-Scots Centre in Belfast.

Front Cover: The mosaic in St Anne’s Cathedral, Belfast, depicting ‘St Patrick, Apostle of Christ’ sailing from Scotland, with a Scottish saltire below his feet. The mosaic is part of the Chapel of the Holy Spirit, consecrated on 5 June 1932, as part of the 1500th anniversary commemorations of Patrick’s arrival in Ireland in AD432. Created

by London-based artists Gertrude and Mary Martin, it was funded by Belfast merchant Edwin Henry Shaw who lived at Ailsa Lodge, Craigavad. The Martins had previously worked on similar commissions at Westminster Cathedral and the Houses of Parliament

Sunset at Templepatrick

Templepatrick, County Down, St. Patrick’s landing place For hundreds of years, the main route for travellers between Scotland and Ulster was the 22-mile crossing from Portpatrick to Donaghadee.

Just a couple of miles south of Donaghadee, on the coast road to Millisle, lies the small townland of Templepatrick, which centuries of local tradition holds to be the place where one famous traveller, Saint Patrick, first set foot in Ireland.

You could be forgiven for thinking that because Donaghadee is an Ulster-Scots town in a very strongly Ulster-Scots settled part of the country that such tradition might have been brought over from Scotland, but that is not the case. The early Ulster-Scots settlers learned of this tradition from their Irish neighbours.

The Montgomery Manuscripts are one of the most important accounts of the settlement of Lowland Scots in Ulster in the 1600s. They were compiled by William Montgomery, the grandson of Sir Hugh Montgomery who organised the first Ulster-Scots settlement of County Down and founded Donaghadee. William also wrote A Description of the Ardes Barony in the County

of Down in 1683 and his expanded 1701 edition explained, “Neare this place are ye ruins of a small church, called Temple Patrick, where it is said St. Patrick first landed in Ireland; there is his well also, and other traditions among ye Irish concerning it.”

THE TEMPLEPATRICK TRADITION

The Templepatrick tradition was passed on down the generations by the Ulster-Scots and regularly written about. A correspondent in the Belfast News Letter in March 1881 wrote that, “The tradition of the neighbourhood – in which the writer was born and brought up – is that St Patrick was brought as a captive to Ireland by way of Portpatrick, that he set foot in Ireland at Templepatrick, and that a church was built upon the spot to keep his arrival in remembrance. Is this not highly probable? Why were these two places, opposite each other, called Portpatrick and Templepatrick? Why should there be a church and a graveyard on this strange, rough bit of ground jutting out into the sea… and, looking into

the geography of the matter, does not this tend to confirm the belief that Patrick was born near Dumbarton, and carried away from thence?”

Ulster-Scots historian and author WG Lyttle, who founded the North Down Herald newspaper, wrote an entertaining account of the Templepatrick traditions in his 1885 travel book The Bangor Season – What’s To Be Seen and How To See It: ‘After passing a mile of charming coast scenery we come upon Templepatrick graveyard, thickly studded with gravestones… and among the adjacent rocks can be pointed out the prints of St. Patrick’s foot and his horse’s hoof; but better – a thousand times better is St. Patrick’s well – pure, sparkling, over-flowing, flowing and running over for hundreds of years, yet as full as ever, and as pure as ever. We don’t ask strangers to believe that either St. Patrick or his horse was so heavy footed, as that they left the prints of their feet in the rock; but we do ask them to believe that this well, no matter who built it, is limpid, sparkling, pure and better for quenching thirst than all the intoxicating liquors ever distilled or brewed.

Wednesday March 16 2022

Stranger! If you are thirsty drink, and if you are not thirsty, we would, nevertheless, respectfully ask you to drink, that you may be able to say in all future time, “the purest water I ever drank was out of St. Patrick’s well, near Donaghadee”.’

SEASHORE CHURCH

A few years later, in 1868, R. Steele Nicholson’s Saint Patrick, Apostle of Ireland in the Third Century: The Story of his Mission, observed that, ‘St. Patrick crossed the narrow seas between Scotland and Ireland, either on his being brought

Templepatrick Graveyard

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to Ireland as a captive, or on the occasion of some other memorable visit, viz., his first arrival as a Christian Missionary, there is evidence in the fact, that on the Irish coast, directly opposite to Portpatrick in Scotland, there is a place called Templepatrick near to Donaghadee, in the County Down.

“There are, at present, no vestiges of the church which must have, at one time, existed there; but the spot is marked by an ancient burial-place, still used as such, within a very few yards of the sea, and by a well called St Patrick’s Well.

‘The tradition in the neighbourhood is, that it is the place where the Saint landed, on his first coming to Ireland; and the erection of a church on a spot as close to the seashore as a building could be put, apparently for the purpose of commemorating a landing, gives additional weight to the tradition.’

References to the Templepatrick tradition continued in the local papers well into the 20th century. An essay in The Northern Whig in October 1929 stated, ‘Though Donaghadee cannot claim to be the birthplace of any famous people, from the earliest times it has been associated with many celebrities. In 422 AD King Dathi, the last Pagan monarch of Ireland, set out on his victorious campaigns in England, Scotland and France... Saint Patrick is said to have landed at the old graveyard of Templepatrick, just one mile south of Donaghadee, and his footprint is still shown in the rock. There is a well here which is supposed to have the power of curing headaches.

There is another well in the grounds of the Roman Catholic Church which is also associated with him…’

Another article in The North Down Herald in March 1931 recorded that, ‘the ancient Romanised Scots would have it that he was born in the parish of Bearsden, or Old Kilpatrick in Dumbarton …

One story is that he was put in a coracle at Port Patrick in Wigtownshire, and floated across on his way to Donaghadee, only the winds wafted the little craft down the coast ... and finally he landed at Templepatrick, halfway to Millisle...”

Today, Templepatrick is best identified by the small graveyard between the coast road and the sea shore, but if you are going to go in search of Saint Patrick’s footprint, the safest place to park your car is in the parking area on the opposite side of the road.

The historian WG Lyttle’s account of the Templepatrick tradition in his 1885 travel book The Bangor Season – What’s To Be Seen and How To See It

A map of the Donaghadee area including Templepatrick, circa 1900

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The first page of Patrick’s Confessio from The Book of Armagh. © Board of Trinity College Dublin

Patrick: In His Own Words Patrick is often described as a ‘Romano-Briton’.

Even though by the time he was born the military might of the Roman Empire was declining, and within Patrick’s lifetime they would withdraw their armies from Britain, culturally the Romans left an indelible mark. Religious life was a complex mix – a landscape with artefacts of Roman gods such as Jupiter and Mars, and native Pagan Druids – with the Christian faith grappling with new ‘heresies’ from Arius and Pelagius. The ancient tribes of Scoti from Ireland and Picts from Scotland were all part of the world that Patrick spoke into.

Scottish academic Dr Alan MacQuarrie has

observed that ‘of all the saints of the British Isles, none has aroused greater controversy or generated a more voluminous literature than has St Patrick’. The Waterford-born historian Edward Arthur Thompson made the same point more colourfully – ‘among them is a lunatic fringe as massive as the Mountains of Mourne in Ulster!’

Only two of Patrick’s own writings have survived – his Confessio, and his Letter to the Soldiers of Coroticus. These are the most reliable texts to draw from, and from which to compare the later Scottish traditions. Many authors have done so over the centuries. Both were written in Latin. Patrick’s writings are primarily spiritual

and biographical, but they also indicate a sense of geography. All other later writings about Patrick were not written by him personally.

PATRICK’S BIRTHPLACE

In his Confessio Patrick says that his father and grandfather ‘belonged to the village of Banavem Taberniae’. Historians have debated about its exact location.

Five miles from Old Kilpatrick, further along the route of the Antonine Wall, is Bonnaughton.

Today it is within the Bearsden suburb in the hills north of Glasgow, at the site of the Castle Hill Antonine Wall fort. It overlooks the River Clyde,

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Erskine Bridge

Old Kilpatrick and Dumbarton Rock. You can visit the impressive remains of the Roman Bath House at Bearsden still today, situated on a street which is called Roman Road, beside the site of the New Kilpatrick Roman Wall Fort.

John Irving’s 1928 book Place Names of Dumbartonshire includes this entry, attempting to connect Patrick’s reference to Banavem Taberniae from his Confessio: ‘Bonnaughton, BANNA-VENTA. Horn market place, from G.bann, a horn. BANNAUCHTANE 1549, BALNAUCHTON 1755. Latin form Bannavem Taberniae. This place is just at the traditional spot of St Patrick’s birth. His father, a decurion

of Nemthur (ie Dumbarton) had a Villula here.

The word taberniae may be possibly traced in Edinbarnet, which is close-by. Nemthur or Nevthuris now identified as Dumbarton. (See Dr. Murray’s Early Burgh Organization in Scotland, p. 27, p. 572).’ Many other places in this and other countries have been suggested as the birthplace of St Patrick, but Bonnaughton would seem to have the best-established claim.

The 1879 volume, The Book of Dumbartonshire, proposes a different location, also in the Clyde area: ‘The most recent theory as to the saint’s birthplace limits it to the Strathclyde district, but removes the precise locality from either

Dumbarton or Kilpatrick, where a favoured shrine was erected in his honour, to a point on the Avon near Hamilton, as more likely to be identical with the Bonaven and Tiburnia of the early chronicles’.

St Peter’s College, of the Passionist Order in St Patrick’s Province (Ireland and Scotland), was founded in Bearsden in 1874 as the new Catholic college for the west of Scotland. The report in The Tablet of 3 May 1890 said that ‘... the site of the college has a special interest for Catholics, as it is part of the original parish of Kilpatrick, which derived its name from St Patrick who, some say, was born there. A quarter of a mile west of the village there is a piece of rising ground

called Chapel Hill, which was the site of the western terminal fort of the great Roman wall of Antoninus’.

At the opening event the Archbishop Charles Petre Eyre of Glasgow said: “The old parish of Kilpatrick was the spot where, there could be no doubt, St Patrick was born. They knew that for a thousand years there was never any doubt on the subject of the tradition of the birthplace of St Patrick. It had only been in later years that some persons had ventured to call this into question.

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Dumbarton Rock

Roman Bath House at Bearsden

St Patrick’s father was Calpurnius, a Roman judge located at the extremity of the barrier that divided the Roman territory from the northern part of the country. That barrier extended from the Firth of Forth to the extreme west end of the spot now called Chapel Hill. There was no doubt that this was the spot where the father of St Patrick lived and where St Patrick was born.”

Archbishop Eyre later continued the theme: “They took it for granted that he was born at Kilpatrick, and that he was a genuine son of the diocese of Glasgow. He was well represented now in that diocese. In former days there was a large influx from the coast of Ireland, from Dalriada to the west of Scotland, and in our times also we witnessed a similar large immigration into Scotland from the west of Ireland. He was sure that St Patrick was glad to see those children of his who crossed the sea in order to make their way to find employment, and to settle down on a spot close to where he was born.”

When the farmstead of Bonnaughton came up for sale in 1916, it was bought by St Peter’s College. Perhaps they knew of the place-name associations with Patrick’s Banavem Taberniae.

In his Letter to the Soldiers of Coroticus Patrick says, ‘I am born of a father who was a Decurion...‘ During the 20th century Bonnaughton became a large housing development and today is within Bearsden.

PATRICK’S FATHER AND GRANDFATHER

In his Confessio Patrick writes, ‘My father was Calpurnius, a deacon, one of the sons of Potitus, a presbyter, who belonged to the village of Banavem Taberniae. Now he had a small farm hard by...’ In his Letter to the Soldiers of Coroticus Patrick says, ‘I am born of a father who was a Decurion...’

Patrick’s father and grandfather both held positions within their Christian community – his father was a ‘deacon’ and his grandfather was a ‘presbyter’ (other English language translations from the Latin original use other terms, such as ‘priest’). By occupation his father was a ‘decurion’, which was a member of a city or town council in the Roman era. County Antrim born Eoin MacNeill in his St Patrick, Apostle of Ireland (1934) wrote, ‘For a time the place that was most in favour was Dumbarton in Scotland, but there never was a Roman town with decurions holding office in it in that region or indeed any

part of Scotland’. However, the Scottish historian Robert Chambers (author of The Chambers Dictionary) gave numerous possible options in his Biographical Dictionary of Eminent Scotsmen: ‘His father, whose name was Calpurnius, was in a respectable station in life, being municipal magistrate in the town in which he lived. What town this was, however, is not certainly known, whether Kilpatrick, a small village on the Clyde five miles east of Dumbarton; Duntocher, another small village about a mile north of Kilpatrick, or Dumbarton itself. One of the three, however, it is presumed it must have been, as it is described as being situated in the north-west part of the Roman province ... conjecture has favoured Kilpatrick. His father is supposed (for nearly all that is recorded of the holy man is conjectural, or at best but inferential) to have come to Scotland in a civil capacity with the Roman troops under Theodosius.’

PATRICK’S KIDNAP AND ESCAPE

In his Confessio Patrick says – ‘where I was taken captive. I was then about sixteen years of age...’

The Erskine Bridge was built across the River

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Tradition has it that Patrick tended sheep on Slemish Mountain, County Antrim

Clyde in the early 1970s, and overlooks Old Kilpatrick. On the other side of the Clyde, opposite Old Kilpatrick, is St Patrick’s Rock which is today almost directly under the Erskine Bridge. For generations it has been regarded as the traditional place from which Patrick was taken by the slave traders. In 1893, John Bruce recorded in his History of the Parish of Kilpatrick, that ‘There is Patrick’s Rock, near Erskine Ferry, on which it is said, he was fishing as a boy when carried off to Ireland’. In the middle of the 20th century, a beacon light to assist boats was fixed to the rock and the beacon is known as St Patrick’s Light.

In his Confessio Patrick says, ‘I went into captivity in Ireland with many thousands of persons ... when a youth, nay, almost a boy, I went into captivity ... now after I came to Ireland,

tending flocks was my daily occupation ... thereupon I shortly took to flight, and left the man with whom I had been for six years ... and again, after a few years, I was in Britain with my kindred, who received me as a son ...’

The proximity of Antrim to Scotland lends credence to the Old Kilpatrick and Clyde traditions. Patrick clearly states that he spent six years in captivity in Ireland. However, he specifies neither Slemish / Sliabh Mis, the traditional location where he spent those six years, nor Milchu / Miliucc, the man whom tradition says he worked for there. Both details appear in a later source, The Book of Armagh, written around 807AD. The History of the Parish of Kilpatrick reflects these: ‘The Scotic freebooters from Antrim frequently

ravaged the shores of the Firth of Clyde, and the Romans must have suffered much at their hands, as is evidenced by the numerous finds of Roman coins all along the Antrim coast ...

Patrick’s place of captivity was close to the village of Broughshane, five miles from Ballymena, in the valley of the Braid, near the Hill of Slemish ...

Patrick was employed by a chieftain, Milchu by name, son of Hua Bain, King of North Dalriada...’

LETTER TO THE SOLDIERS OF COROTICUS

In his Letter to the Soldiers of Coroticus Patrick says that – ‘With mine own hand I have written and composed these words to be given and sent to the soldiers of Coroticus ... allies of the Scots and apostate Picts ... far from the love of God is he who

betrays Christians into the hands of the Scots and the Picts.’

Patrick gives no place names in this Letter, but the references to Scots (which then was the name for people from Ireland) and Picts (people from the north of Scotland) requires a location close to where those peoples were active. In the Clyde area, the Brittonic Kingdom of Alt Clut / Strathclyde was ruled from Dumbarton Rock.

Saint Patrick: A Fifteenth Centenary Memorial Book, published by the Dublin Catholic Truth Society of Ireland in 1932, records that ‘... in what is now Lowland Scotland ... the Britons of that region had escaped the demoralisation of conquest ...one of these princes was named Corotic ... he became king of the Rock of Clyde, the fortress of Dumbarton ...’

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Roman Empire

The Ancient World: A Very Different Place

The ancient world, its places and peoples, was very different than today. The name for Ireland, ‘Hibernia’, is said to have come from the Romans, with the first century historian Tacitus calling it ‘Land of Winter’. The Romans called the pirates from Hibernia the ‘Scotti’, and some maps of the Roman era show Ireland named as ‘Scotia’.

Kingdoms such as Dál Riada, Dál Araide and Dál Fiatach were in today’s Antrim and Down.

Julius Caesar led a Roman invasion of Britain in 55BC. Over a century later in AD78 Agricola was appointed as Roman Governor of Britain and made an advance into the north of Scotland.

General Agricola led the Romans at The Battle of Mons Graupius of AD84, against the Caledonians.

It took place in the northeast of Scotland in the vicinity of the Grampian Mountains ‘Mons Graupius’. The Roman Empire reached its maximum extent around AD117 under Emperor Trajan, ruling over an estimated 70 million people.

HADRIAN’S WALL

Trajan’s successor, Emperor Hadrian, visited Britain in AD122 and ordered his world-famous wall built from the Solway Firth to the Tyne, spanning 80 miles from Maryport on the west coast to South Shields on the east coast of today’s northern England. It marked the boundary

between Roman Britannia to the south and unconquered Caledonia to the north. More than just a wall, it had castles, forts and settlements along its route. It was wide enough for soldiers to walk along, with a defensive ditch in front.

Hadrian’s successor, Emperor Antoninus Pius, launched a renewed campaign against the Caledonian tribes and by AD142 had conquered the area we know today as southern Scotland.

He then ordered the construction of a wall from the Firth of Clyde in the west to the Firth of Forth in the east. His ‘Antonine Wall’ would give the occupying Romans more protection; it had 18 small forts along its length. It took 12 years to build and carved ‘distance stones’ were inset into the wall when a new section was completed. It may have been built on top of an earlier, lesser, wall from the Agricola era.

The area of Lowland Scotland between the two Roman walls was called ‘Valentia’ or the ‘Intervallum’, with four dominant tribes recorded

by Ptolemy on his famous maps. It is this area where Patrick and his family are believed to have lived. North of the Antonine Wall were the ‘Caledonii’, from whom the name ‘Caledonia’ comes. The Romans also referred to a people called ‘Picti’, or Picts, believed to be named because they wrote using pictures.

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Trial of the Apostle Paul by Nikolai Bodarevsky

Martyrdom of St Stephen

by Giovanni Andrea De Ferrari

Roman Emperor Septimius Severus ruled from AD193 to AD211. An intriguing article in the Larne Times on 27 April 1950 referred to a story from his era. A sea-captain called Virgilius Collatinus was blown off course while sailing a Roman galley to the Solway Firth in Scotland. The ship was swept across to the coast of Antrim and found refuge in a harbour which he refers to as ‘Portus Saxa’, thought to be today’s Larne. Emperor Septimius Severus personally led a new campaign in Britain with 50,000 men who intended to take all of Caledonia. His campaign was focussed on the east; he reinforced the existing walls, but during the campaign he died, leaving Caledonia unconquered.

PERSECUTION

For three centuries after the time of Christ, persecution from the religious and political establishments was suffered by the early Christians. After the death, resurrection and ascension of Christ in AD33, the first Christian martyr recorded in the New Testament was Stephen (Acts, chapter 7). As Christ’s disciples continued to spread the faith outwards beyond Jerusalem, westwards around the Mediterranean Sea and eastwards as far as India, many of them would also be martyred.

One of their persecutors, who had been present at Stephen’s death, was Saul of Tarsus, a devout Pharisee Jew and a Roman citizen. He famously became a Christian convert and, as the Apostle Paul, wrote half of the books of the New Testament (Paul was imprisoned by the Roman governor Antonius Felix for two years; brought before his successor Porcius Festus who planned to send Paul to Emperor Nero in Rome, and also brought before Herod Agrippa II, King of Judea. Tradition says that Paul himself died as a martyr, in Rome or Spain).

Three hundred years of persecution by the Roman Empire caused countless thousands to die, but their beliefs and ideas would not. The infrastructure of Empire provided a way for the Christian faith to spread across Europe. In AD313 in his Edict of Milan, Emperor Constantine made Christianity legal. He held a Christian ‘council’ at Arles in Burgundy (today’s France) the following year. Three bishops and a deacon from Britain are said to have been present. To counter the growth of controversial ‘Arian’ ideas, in AD325 Constantine oversaw the formation of the ‘Nicene Creed’, a simplified statement of orthodox Christian beliefs which is still accepted today across all of the major Christian denominations.

In AD380 Emperor Theodosius made Christianity the official religion of the Empire.

Scotland in the Roman Period

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Some illustrations from Historic Decorations at the Pan-Presbyterian Council, Philadelphia 1880. The second image here shows Patrick and Columba as ‘Ireland’s Primitive Presbyters’.

Ulster has a unique cultural landscape, brought about by centuries of interaction between the Irish, Scots and English peoples. Our traditional music, dances, the sports we play and the languages we use when we speak all reflect this mix. It is also reflected in the Catholic, Anglican and Presbyterian churches that many of us attend, with the latter two having their origins in England and Scotland. Our cultural diversity has also informed our political outlooks, although these have not always been consistent. Often the English and Scots would side with each other, but sometimes the Scots would side with the Irish. Since the late 19th Century, Unionism and Nationalism have been the dominant political viewpoints, largely overlapping with respective cultural identities.

Despite all of this diversity, often disagreement and sometimes conflict between cultural and political identities, historically there has been a great deal of common ground about the Scottish traditions associated with the man who brought Christianity to these shores.

Armagh’s Church of Ireland and Catholic St Patrick’s Cathedrals. Image ©Tourism Northern Ireland

On Common Ground: Patrick’s Scottish Story

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Rev Thomas Hamilton

A Presbyterian Perspective

“If then, he was born in Scotland, there can be no doubt he was ‘born again’ in Ireland...”

Rev Thomas Hamilton, President of Queen’s University, Belfast.

The university crest (right) includes a St Patrick’s saltire

In 1886, Rev Thomas Hamilton published his History of the Presbyterian Church in Ireland, which included a chapter about St Patrick. In 1889 Hamilton was appointed President of Queen’s College, which later became Queen’s University.

Speaking of the Scottish traditions, Hamilton said, ‘There seems therefore no reason to doubt that his birthplace was there, and that the patron saint of Ireland was in reality a Scotsman. There is a place called Kil-patrick (i.e. the Church of Patrick), situated near Dumbarton, in the Firth of Clyde, which is not unlikely to have been the spot where the great missionary first saw the light ... If then, he was born in Scotland, there can be no doubt he was ‘born again’ in Ireland... at the age of sixteen he was taken captive by one of the roving bands of freebooters who in those unsettled and lawless times infested the British coasts. In company with other prisoners, he was carried across the Channel to the North of Ireland and sold as a slave ...climbed the steep sides of Slemish, and from its summit doubtless many a time gazed wistfully across the sea to where on the horizon he could dimly descry the hills of his native Scotland. After six years of slavery, he escaped from his master, and making his way to the coast, procured a passage on board a boat, and after enduring many hardships, was able again to re-join his parents in Scotland. It must have been a happy day when they clasped to their hearts once more their long-lost boy ...’

The first historian of Presbyterians in Ireland was Rev Andrew Stewart of Donaghadee. In 1670 he wrote his History of the Church of Ireland after the Scots were naturalized. He included Patrick in his chronology: ‘In those days came Patrick to Ireland; he was a Britton whose name was at first Mannus the sone of one Calfurnius, the son of Potitus a Presbyter, and born in a village called Rosina upon the borders of England and Scotland about the year 370 ... When Mannus was 13 years of age he was taken captive with his two sisters and being brought to Ireland ... after which he went home to his native Countrey ... Now before he came to Ireland he preacht the Gospel first to the Brittons and then to the Scots and last of all he came to Ireland...’

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The Milligan Family and The Shan Van Vocht Another reflection of our cultural mixture is the Milligan family of North Down. Alice Milligan was a renowned figure in the Irish cultural and political movements of the late 1800s and 1900s. She and her younger brother Ernest were both ardent Irish Republicans and friends of James Connolly. Older brother William served in the army during the Boer War, while younger brother Charles served in the Royal Navy during the First World War and went on to serve for 30 years as a Unionist politician, Mayor of Bangor in 1965. Without any sense of contradiction, unionist Charles supported the preservation of the home of 1798 heroine Betsy Gray, while nationalists Alice and Ernest both wrote about or used Ulster-Scots. For a time, Alice was the Editor of the Irish nationalist periodical The Shan Van Vocht, where she wrote about places connected with the life and mission of Saint Patrick, including Dumbarton, of which she said, “The rock of Dumbarton is a familiar object to all who have gone up the Clyde. According to the best authenticated accounts and traditions, near this place St. Patrick, the Apostle of Ireland, was born.”

Alice Milligan, from North Down, edited the nationalist publication The Shan Van Vocht

An Anglican Perspective

In June 1892, Lord Plunket, Church of Ireland Archbishop of Dublin, hosted the members of the Presbyterian General Assembly at a garden party at his residence in Bray. The Cork Constitution printed this report: ‘On Friday afternoon, at Old Connaught, Bray, his Grace Lord Plunket, Archbishop of Dublin, invited to a garden party all the members of the General Assembly and their wives and daughters, and the deputies from the Presbyterian churches of Scotland and their families. His Grace also invited to meet them dignitaries of the Church of Ireland and their families... ‘In giving welcome to my Scotch friends I would remind myself and them that this is not the first interchange of mutual good will that has taken place between the two countries. I read with much interest the reference that was made by one of the speakers at the General Assembly to the effect that St Patrick was a Scotchman who in early times visited our shores, and the gentleman who referred to St Patrick seemed to think that St Patrick was a Presbyterian. Well, I think if you will pardon me for saying that it would require a surgical operation to knock that into my head. At the same time, he certainly was a Scotchman, and we in Ireland are under deep obligation to him for all he did in the way of establishing and confirming Christianity in this our native land.’

Lord Plunket, Church of Ireland Archbishop of Dublin

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Wednesday March 16 2022

A Catholic Perspective

In 1905, The Most Rev Dr. Healy, Catholic Archbishop of Tuam, published The Life and Writings of St Patrick, a meticulous study over 700 pages long. It includes three detailed chapters about Patrick’s birthplace, childhood and captivity, wherein he records: ‘During the past century a great controversy for the first time arose regarding the birthplace of St Patrick ... It appears to us to be quite clear from the account which the Saint gives of himself, both in his Confession and in the Epistle to Coroticus, that he was a native of the Roman province of Britain, and in all probability was born on the banks of the Clyde in Scotland... In the days of St Patrick it was an open plain stretching away to the east under the shadow of the Kilpatrick hills, which here press close on the banks of the Clyde... All the great Irish scholars of the seventeenth century held the same opinion – Usher, Colgan, Ware, O’Flaherty and the rest... It was only early in the nineteenth century that Lanigan started a new hypothesis, which he certainly has not proved, that St Patrick was born in France, near Boulogne-surmer... We conclude, therefore, without any reasonable doubt, that St Patrick was born and nurtured during his early youth at or near Dumbarton, on the banks of the Clyde, in the district which was then known as the ‘Plain of the Tents,’ extending from Dumbarton to Kilpatrick’.

Ireland’s Greatest Historian: Sir Samuel Ferguson

Sir Samuel Ferguson Sir Samuel Ferguson has been described as Ireland’s greatest historian. He was born in Belfast in 1810 but spent much of his childhood at his grandfather’s farm in south Antrim at Four Mile Burn, in the Sixmilewater Valley, within sight of Slemish Mountain. When Ferguson died he was buried there, at St John’s Church of Ireland, Donegore.

Although born into an Ulster-Scots family and community, Ferguson was an Irish cultural enthusiast and leading campaigner for the repeal of the Act of Union. His final work was his translation into English blank verse of Saint Patrick’s writings, which he entitled The Patrician Documents and which was published within the Transactions of the Royal Irish Academy. At Ferguson’s funeral in St Patrick’s Cathedral in Dublin on 12 August 1886, Archbishop Plunket referred to this work as ‘a paper containing a wonderfully beautiful translation of those works which all learned men attribute, as genuine, to the great founder of Christianity ... we should all thank God that, before our dear brother was taken from us, he left us such a legacy’.

The translation was republished in book form in August 1888. In the introduction, his widow Mary Catherine Ferguson recounted the Scottish traditions: “... in insular Britain, within the Roman Province, bounded by the wall of Agricola between the estuaries of the Clyde and Forth. The wall restored in the second century by the Emperor Antoninus Pius ... the birthplace of Patrick has not been recorded by himself, but later biographers state it to have been called Nemthor, otherwise Ail-clyde. Ail-clyde has been identified with Dumbarton on the Clyde, the western terminus of the Roman wall ...”

Most Rev Dr Healy, Archbishop of Tuam

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Wednesday March 16 2022

Alexander Keith Johnston

People in Northern Ireland and throughout the island are very familiar with the fact that many local places and features derive their names from an association with Saint Patrick. Far fewer, however, would be aware that there are also many place names in Scotland which are named for an association with the founder of Christianity in Ireland. The association was once so well known that it was even proposed to rename the North Channel after Saint Patrick!

Robert Chambers (1802–71) was an Edinburgh publisher, whose famous Chambers dictionaries are still in print. He visited the Royal Irish Academy in Dublin in 1847 to view ‘a copy of the gospels which had belonged to St Patrick’.

Chambers’ final book, the famous 1864 miscellany Book of Days, includes Patrick’s Scottish origins and a few of the Scottish churches he founded: “... the footsteps of St. Patrick can be traced, almost from his cradle to his grave, by the names of places called after him. Thus, assuming his Scottish origin, he was born at Kilpatrick (the cell or church of Patrick), in Dumbartonshire. He resided for some time at Dalpatrick (the district or division of Patrick), in Lanarkshire; and visited Crag-phadrig (the rock of Patrick), near Inverness.

He founded two churches, Kirkpatrick at Irongray, in Kirkcudbright; and Kirkpatrick at Fleming, in Dumfries: and ultimately sailed from Portpatrick, leaving behind him such an odour of sanctity, that among the most distinguished families of the Scottish aristocracy, Patrick has been a favourite name down to the present day...”

Portpatrick derives its name from the great Apostle of Ireland, who once, according to legend, here crossed the channel at a single stride, and left a deep footprint on a rock that was removed in the formation of the harbour.

The place names identified by Chambers are not the only places in Scotland which were named after Saint Patrick. The University of Glasgow’s Saints in Scottish Place-Names website lists more than fifty, which can be explored at www.saintsplaces.gla.ac.uk Perhaps the best known of Patrick’s places in Scotland is Portpatrick, situated on Scotland’s west coast, just 22 miles from Ulster. The parish of Portpatrick was established in 1628 when the church was built in the town by Sir Hugh Montgomery, around the same time that he built the parish church in Donaghadee. He tried to

Alexander Keith Johnston’s Map featuring St Patrick’s Channel

Saint Patrick’s Scottish Places rename the towns as ‘Montgomery’ and ‘Port Montgomery’.

HARBOUR FOOTPRINT

The Ordnance Gazetteer of Scotland: A Survey of Scottish Topography, Statistical, Biographical and Historical, 1882–85, gives this account of the name: “Portpatrick derives its name from the great Apostle of Ireland, who once, according to legend, here crossed the channel at a single stride, and left a deep footprint on a rock that was removed in the formation of the harbour.

On another occasion, the savages of Glenapp had cut off his head; but, picking it up, the Saint quietly walked to Portpatrick, plunged into the sea, and, holding his head in his teeth, swam safely to the opposite shore. A chalybeate spring bears the name of St Patrick’s Well; whilst a pre-Reformation chapel, called Chapel Patrick, stood on or near the site of the old parish church ...”. This description was repeated in a booklet entitled Portpatrick Through the Ages by the town’s historian R.R. Cunningham, which was first printed in 1974.

Local tradition also says that there was a rock called ‘St Patrick’s Stone’ in the original harbour which bore an indentation, said to have been Patrick’s footprint. It was lost when the harbour piers were built in the 1820s. According to the Ordnance Survey Name Book of 1860 at the east

side of the town there was a ‘St Patrick’s Well’ – “tradition ascribes the name to have been derived from the great Irish Apostle”.

Sir Andrew Agnew (1818-92) was the 8th Baronet of Lochnaw near Stranraer, and MP for Wigtownshire, which included Portpatrick.

A branch of the Agnews, who for generations carried the Christian name Patrick, had settled near Larne in the early 1600s and built Kilwaughter Castle. His 1893 book The Agnews of Lochnaw: A History of the Hereditary Sheriffs of Galloway includes a detailed account of the St. Patrick traditions of the area.

ST PATRICK’S CHANNEL

Of course, Saint Patrick also travelled on water as well as land, crossing the narrow sea between Scotland and Ulster as both a captive and a missionary. During the 19th century, the famous Edinburgh cartographer Alexander Keith Johnston, who was Scotland’s Geographer Royal, suggested that the North Channel be renamed St Patrick’s Channel (the upper boundary of the North Channel is from Portnahaven on the Scottish island of Islay to Benbane Head near the Giant’s Causeway, while the lower boundary is from the southernmost point of the Mull of Galloway to the southernmost point on the Ards Peninsula). Johnston’s suggestion gained considerable currency, appearing in books, atlases

and maps, no doubt reflecting both his credibility and the longevity of the traditions on both sides of the water.

In his 1865 work The Scenery of Scotland Viewed in Connexion with its Physical Geology, Sir Archibald Geikie recorded that, “From the Southern Uplands, the ice went north into the plains of Ayrshire, until, meeting the stream from the Highlands, it turned southward into St. Patrick’s Channel.” In 1907, John Halford Mackinder, author of Our Own Islands; an Elementary Study in Geography, wrote that, “the Strait which separates the north of Ireland from Scotland is called the North Channel. It is only thirteen miles across and is therefore much narrower even than the Strait of Dover. It is also often called St. Patrick’s Channel, from St. Patrick, the patron saint of Ireland.”

The name was used officially by the Irish Lights Board in 1901 when listing the lighthouses they were responsible for: and in 1914, it was used in proposals for a ‘submerged tube’ crossing between Ireland and Scotland. In 1937 the BBC also used it, in an hour-long radio programme, ‘Across St Patrick’s Channel’ broadcast in Scotland, Ulster and the Irish Free State. We will have to wait a while longer for the tunnel under the North Channel, but maybe in the meantime we could finally rename the channel itself in honour of Patrick, Ulster’s Scottish Saint.

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Wednesday March 16 2022

St Patrick Street, Portpatrick, with the round tower of the Old Parish Kirk visible, which was built by Sir Hugh Montgomery in the 1620s Portpatrick Harbour

Robert Chambers, circa 1863

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