An Irish Diary

The Birdman of Glendalough – An Irishman’s Diary about St Kevin

Glendalough, Co Wicklow. Photograph: Nick Bradshaw

Frank McNally's face
Frank McNally
Thu May 31 2018 - 00:01

Not the least remarkable thing about St Kevin of Glendalough, if we can believe the stories, is that he lived to be 120. He died 1,400 years ago, on June 3rd, 618, and was so well known by then that at least that date might be considered reliable. But most of his life is undocumented, so we may have to take it on faith that he had been born in 498, as tradition also has it.

Perhaps his longevity owed something to the ascetic lifestyle he practised for years.

A hermit, he slept in a metre-high cave (“St Kevin’s Bed”) on the side of a steep hill.

He wore only animal skins.  And he threw them off in winter to immerse himself for hours in the freezing lake below or, for a similar effect in summer, to plunge himself into forests of nettle.

READ MORE

It’s possible that, in common with other hermits, he didn’t like people much. If so, it was his misfortune as a famous holy man to attract followers. He escaped them as long as he could.

Then he relented, and a monastic community grew up around him, gradually populating Glendalough Valley.

St Kevin's Bed is still there too, in the cliffside, and although it's not yet listed on Airbnb (give it time), he is almost certainly not the last person to have slept in it.

It was, as Thomas Cahill writes in How the Irish Saved Civilisation, "a kind of university city, to which came thousands of hopeful students first from all over Ireland, then from England, and at last from everywhere in Europe".

A millennium and a half before Donogh O’Malley had the same idea, Kevin and his monks provided free education. In keeping with an ancient Irish virtue, they also offered unlimited hospitality. The Venerable Bede, the “father of English history”, described the attractions of such places for his compatriots:  “Many of the nobles of the English nation and lesser men also set out thither, forsaking their native island either for the grace of sacred learning or a more austere life. [Some] dedicated themselves faithfully to monastic life, others rejoiced rather to give themselves to learning, going about from one master’s cell to another. All these the Irish willingly received, and saw to it to supply them with food day by day without cost, and books for their studies, and teaching, free of charge.”

From this, as Cahill notes, we learn that Ireland’s monastic universities accepted commoners as well as nobles (although Kevin himself was reputedly of noble birth), and also those who wished merely to learn, not to become monks themselves.

Nor was the learning confined to scriptures, as elsewhere. Importing anything Greek or Latin they could get their hands on for the libraries, writes Cahill, “they shocked conventional churchmen, who had been trained to value Christian literature principally and give a wide berth to the dubious morality of the pagan classics”.

St Kevin’s hospitality famously extended to animals.

Praying in his tiny cell once, according to legend, he had to extend his arm out a window.

His hand was so still that a blackbird nested in it, so the saint was forced to keep it there until the eggs hatched eventually and the chicks flew away.

In his poem St Kevin and the Blackbird, Seamus Heaney wonders whether the holy man was in agony throughout this ordeal, or rather lost in a zen-like trance, having "forgotten self, forgotten bird/And on the riverbank forgotten the river's name".

A less romantic legend about Kevin suggests he once drowned a woman who tried to seduce him.

This too has been commemorated in poetry, of a kind. As sung by the Dubliners, The Glendalough Saint includes the following verse: "Well he gave the poor creature a shake/And I wish that a garda had caught him/For he threw her right into the lake/And bejasus she sank to the bottom."

If his life-story is short of hard facts, his memory doesn’t lack for hard monuments.

The monastic ruins at Glendalough are among Ireland’s most important and best preserved, especially the 30-metre round tower and the 12th-century St Kevin’s Church.

St Kevin’s Bed is still there too, in the cliffside, and although it’s not yet listed on Airbnb (give it time), he is almost certainly not the last person to have slept in it.

According to one tradition, the Archbishop of Dublin St Laurence O’Toole used to spend time there during Lent.

And it has been associated with retreats of another kind too.

In the years after the 1798 rebellion, as he continued a guerrilla war from the mountains, Wicklow rebel Michael Dwyer is said to have hid out in the cave, and to have escaped capture once by diving into the lake.

LATEST STORIES