Annotations - Page 2

tree. A stranger made his appearance, and the leper, having assured himself that he was a Christian, requested him to uproot a bundle of rushes and to give him in a clean vessel of the water that would burst forth. Then the leper begged of the stranger to bring tools for digging, and to bury him there; and he was the first dead man to be buried in Clonmacnois. Now after this had taken place, the nephew of Patrick, Bishop Muinis, chanced to be benighted on the same spot, when returning from a mission to Rome on which the apostle had sent him. There were angels hovering over the leper's grave, and thus Muinis recognised it as the burial-place of a man of God. He deposited the relics which he was bearing back from Rome, for the night, in the hollow elm; but he found in the morning that the tree had closed upon them, and that they could not be recovered. In sorrow for their loss, he related the event to Patrick, and for his comfort he was told that a Son of Life--to wit Ciaran, son of the wright--was destined to come thither, and that he would need the relics. These relics are mentioned in VG 41, though "Benen and Cumlach" [the leper] are there said to have left them, not Muinis. From this reference we learn that they were attributed to Saints Peter and Paul.

It is quite clear that this curious story has reached us in a fragmentary and expurgated form, and that if we had the whole narrative before us it would afford us an indication that Clonmacnois was the site of an earlier, Pagan, sanctuary. It will most probably be found to be an invariable rule that the early Christian establishments in Ireland occupy the sites of Pagan sanctuaries; the monastery having been founded to re-consecrate the holy place to the True Faith. The hollow elm was doubtless a sacred tree; the well which miraculously burst forth was a sacred well: the buried leper may have been a foundation sacrifice, like Oran on Iona. The old pre-Christian name of the site is suggestive--Ard Tiprat, "the high place of the [holy] well." By no stretch of language can the site of Clonmacnois be called physically high; as in the stanza quoted in VG 30, the word Ard must be used in the sense of distinguished, eminent, or sacred.

Of the prophecy attributed to Brigit there appears to be no record in any of her numerous Lives: nor can I identify with certainty the story of "the fire and the angel." There were "Crosses of Brigit" at Armagh;[3] but as there were probably many other crosses throughout the country dedicated to this popular saint we cannot infer that Armagh was the scene of the prophecy.

Becc mac De was chief soothsayer to King Diarmait mac Cerrbeil. Very little is certainly known of him; most of the traditions relating to him consist of tales of his remarkable gift of foretelling the future--tales similar to those related of the Covenanter Alexander Peden in Scotland, or of the seventeenth-century Mayo peasant Red