Kevin was sent for nurture to a Cornish holy man, St. Petroc, who had come to spread the light in Wicklow, but the young Prince finished his studies under the guidance of his own uncle, Eoghan or Eugenius, who had a monastic school somewhere in the beautiful parish of Glenealy on the sunny south-eastern slope of these hills.
He was a handsome lad, and his looks so distracted a beautiful girl that she tried to seduce him from his vocation. Modern tradition tells that she followed him into his cave in the cliff above the upper lake, and that he flung her out into the water. The Life of him relates a different version, according to which he threw her into a bed of nettles and whipped her with them over her face and arms till, as the pious author says, the fire without subdued the fire within, and his discipline determined her to follow his example and enter the monastic life.
ST. KEVIN’S BED AND THE CHURCH OF THE ROCK, UPPER LAKE GLENDALOUGH
However that be, Kevin fled from the society of men—and women—to take up his abode in the lovely but peaceful spot for ever associated with his name: “a valley closed in by lofty and precipitous mountains beside a lake”. “On the northern shore”, says the Life, “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 an overstatement: any active man can get into the Bed from above; but even from below (where Mr. Williams shows the boat lying in his picture) it needs some climbing. Within is only room for a man to sit or lie—not to stand. But Kevin’s dwelling on the north shore was leafy and bird-haunted, and the wild creatures, it is said, used to come and light on his shoulder, and sing their sweetest songs to God’s solitary.
At last his fame went aboard, and folk flocked to his sanctuary and begged him to found a monastery. He submitted unwillingly, and let them build him (still on the slope of the same mountain, Lugduff) a beehive cell of stones, or “skellig”: and near it they built an oratory, Tempul-na-Skellig, on a rock projecting into the lake—now wrecked, for, as Archbishop Healy writes in his Ancient Schools and Scholars, “fifty years of tourists in the mountain valley have caused more ruin to these venerable monuments than centuries of civil war”.
But there was no room on this cliffy shore, and Kevin was admonished in a vision to build in the open space by the outfall of the lower lake. “If it were God’s will,” said Kevin, “I would rather remain until my death here where I have laboured.” “But,” said the angel, “if you dwell where I bid you, many blessed souls will have their resurrection there and go with you to the heavenly kingdom.” So Kevin consented to move; and he built the monastery on which all those churches and towers sprang up that can be seen or traced to-day. Yet in this city he did not depart from his austerities, but slept on the bare ground and lived on herbs and water.
The foundation of the monastery may date from about 540. Kevin lived on, they say, till 620, and died surrounded by his disciples, a man of God and a peacemaker, among the best beloved of Ireland’s saints.