Insula Sanctorum et Doctorum; Or, Ireland's Ancient Schools and Scholars

by John Healy

There was it seems another reason, too, which has been much distorted by poetic licence, that induced him to fly from his native district. The genuine story is told in his Life, and is very different from the popular and poetic account. Coemghen was a very handsome youth, and his good looks won the affection of a beautiful girl of his own age, whose sorrow was great to find her love not only unrequited, but unnoticed. On one occasion she even followed the gracious boy, when he went with his brothers to the woods, and finding him alone exerted all her blandishments to win his heart. The young saint, tormented instead of softened by her proffered caresses, which he had tried in vain to repel, resolved to give her a lesson for the future. He had flung himself half-naked into a brake full of nettles, and now gathering a handful, he scourged the girl with the burning nettles on her face and arms. “The fire without,” says the author of the saint’s Life, “extinguished the fire within.” Her heart was touched with the grace of penance. She humbly asked Coemghen’s pardon for all she had done to tempt him, and besought him to pray to God in her behalf. Such prayers could not but be heard; and so we are told that she became a sincere convert, consecrating her virginity to God, and faithfully following all the years of her life the counsels and spiritual guidance of St. Coemghen. To scourge the fair Kathleen with nettles for the good of her soul is a very different thing from flinging her into the lake.

Before Kevin retired to the recesses of Glendalough, he was ordained priest by Bishop Lugaidh, or Lugidus. Some persons think it was by his advice that Coemghen sought that lonely retreat.

In order to understand the subsequent events in the life of St. Coemghen, or, as we may now call him, St. Kevin, it is necessary to have some idea of the topography of Glendalough.

The valley is something more than two miles long, and about three quarters in average breadth. It runs from east to west, slightly trending towards the north at its western extremity. Towards the east it gradually opens into the valley of the Avonmore; but on the other three sides it is completely enclosed by lofty and precipitous mountains. To the south, or left hand, looking westward, are the mountains of Derrybawn and Lugduff, the latter especially rising in steep and gloomy grandeur, like a great wall, from the floor of the valley. On the north or right hand are the two mountains of Brockagh and Comaderry—neither so bold nor so steep as Lugduff; Comaderry, however, rises to the height of 2,296 feet, while Lugduff is only 2,140 above the level of the sea.

There are two lakes in this dark valley, one called the Upper, or western lake, which is the larger and gloomier sheet of water lying under the gigantic shadow of Lugduff, whose cliffs rise sheer from the water to the height of 1,000 feet. The Lower, or eastern lakelet, is smaller and brighter in its aspect, and leaves a foot passage on either side between its shores and the mountains to the north and south. At the extreme western end of the valley a mountain torrent dashes down a steep ravine into the lake, forming a fine cascade, which may be seen from the eastern shore of the lake. There is another mountain stream that rushes down between Lugduff and Derrybawn on the south, forming a grand waterfall called Pollanass, escaping from which its waters enter the Upper Lake at its south-eastern extremity. Fed by these two streams and numerous rivulets, the Upper Lake sends out its surplus waters down the valley in a considerable stream called here the Glenealo River, which rushes eastward over the broken ground until it takes rest for a while in the Lower Lake. Emerging thence, and still flowing eastward for half a mile, it unites with another stream called the Glendasan River, which flows down the back of Comaderry mountain. For about a quarter of a mile before uniting, these two streams flow almost parallel through the valley, and then suddenly bending towards each other, send their united waters still eastward to join the Avonmore at Larah, towards the eastern extremity of the Valley of Glendalough. The delta, formed in the valley by the Glenealo and Glendasan rivers, was the site of the ‘City’ of Glendalough, and there still the principal ruins are to be found.

When Kevin fled from Kilnamanagh and its dangers, he penetrated to the very heart of this wilderness, and took up his abode in its most inaccessible retreats. The writer of his Life gives a most accurate description of the spot which he chose for his place of abode. “It was a valley closed in with lofty and precipitous mountains, and in the western part of this valley towards the south he found a lake enclosed between two mountains.”[322] On the shores of this lake he lived for seven years the life of a solitary, without fire, without a roof, and almost without human food. “On the northern shore his dwelling was in a hollow tree; but on the southern shore of the lake he dwelt in a very narrow cave, to which there was no access except by a boat, for a perpendicular rock of immense height overhangs it from above.” This is St. Kevin’s Bed on the face of Lugduff, overhanging the southern shore of the Upper Lake, whose deep waters wash the base of the rock 30 feet beneath. Even from the lake the path is steep and difficult, but not dangerous. Very few, however, have the steadiness and courage to descend to the cave from the overhanging cliffs above.

The cave itself is only about four feet square, and not high enough to stand upright in. But there is a smaller hollow within where the saint might lay his head and snatch his few hours of brief repose. It was a dizzy height, and a hard bed; but we cannot judge of the saints of God by our own worldly and selfish standard. And for one who loved God and His glorious works, as St. Kevin did, there were never wanting, by day or night, sights and sounds to fill his mind with manifold ideas of the wondrous attributes of the great Author of all. The majesty of these dark mountains, the changing glories of these lakes and streams, the voices of the falling waters, the roaring of the storms through the wintry hills, Arturus and the Bear rising over the lofty crest of Comaderry and for ever silently sweeping round the changeless pole, the morning sun flooding the dark valley with light—a pale reflection of the splendour around the Great White Throne—these were the sights that met his eyes, and the voices that spoke in his ears during the days and nights that he spent on the rocky floor of his narrow cell. He spoke to no man, but he communed with God and Nature—his body was on the naked rock, but his soul was in heaven. It was during these years that the birds and beasts came to know and to love the gentle saint, who lived as Adam did in Paradise. He had made for himself a hut of boughs on the northern shore of the lake, where he spent much of his time, and we are told that the birds used to come and alight on his hands and shoulders, and sing for him their sweetest songs; and that the trees were like Æolian harps whose melody lightened the toilsome routine of his life. As for his food, “no man knows on what he lived during these years, for he himself never revealed it to anyone.”

But now it pleased God to make known the virtues of his servant to his fellow men. A shepherd discovered the saint’s retreat, and told far and wide of the holy man who had led for so long the life of an angel in the desert. Crowds of persons made their way to the heart of the mountains, and St. Kevin could no longer be alone. It was revealed to him that he was destined to be the father of many monks, and he submitted to the will of Providence.

Still he was at first unwilling to go far from his beloved cave in Lugduff. So they built him a cell—a circular bee-hive hut of stones—close to the southern shore of the lake; and near at hand his disciples also built him an oratory on a rock projecting from the base of Lugduff into the lake, hence called Tempull-na-Skellig. This was the “clara cella quae Desertum Coemghini appellatur.”[323] But that beautiful and celebrated oratory is now, like the saint’s cell, almost a heap of ruins—the sight-seers are even worse than the Danes, and fifty years of tourists in the mountain valley have caused more ruin to these venerable monuments than centuries of civil strife. Not far from Tempull-na-Skellig, and on the same southern shore of the Upper Lake, there is another ruined church and church-yard, known in the guide books as Rifearta Church; that is, the ‘royal cemetery’ (righ-fearta) of the O’Toole kings. They were not the original rulers of this district; but after the Norman Conquest they retired from the plains of Kildare before the invaders, and held these valleys and mountains as a stronghold of freedom against the ‘strangers.’

But this place became too small for the multitude of the saint’s disciples, who now dwelt around his little church—it was inconveniently situated, too, and very difficult of access. So God’s Angel appeared to Kevin, and commanded him to go and build his monastery at the eastern shore of the smaller lake, about half a mile further down the valley.