Snakes Alive – the ominous associations of St Patrick’s Day

In old English calendars, for reasons unclear, it was believed that March 17th marked the day in ancient times when Noah’s ark had set sail. Not only that, it was also supposed to be the date on which Adam and Eve were evicted from the garden of Eden.

Perhaps it was a link with humanity’s first couple that led to the ark’s association with marital discontent. In the “mystery plays” of the middle ages, Noah and his wife were portrayed as a biblical Punch and Judy, except that the spousal violence that often resulted was mostly inflicted on the husband.

Noah was an easy-going farmer reluctantly forced into ship building. His wife was a harridan who mocked his carpentry skills and general inadequacy. She refused to enter the boat until the very last moment, when the flood waters lapped her ankles, then beat him up again on board. The story was well known to pilgrims in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales.

Maybe it was what we think of as typical St Patrick’s Day weather that first suggested March 17th as ark-sailing time. Conversely, that might also explain why the car-mounted displays in wet, windswept Paddy’s Day parades of childhood memory were called “floats”.

Orwell Appointed – Frank McNally on the raths, rats, and ratlines of a salubrious suburb

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Sergei and the Wolf – Frank McNally on the tragic timing of Sergei Prokofiev

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La Vie en Rosa - the convention-defying artist Rosa Bonheur, born 200 years ago

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Orwellian Road – Frank McNally on Ukrainian echoes in Animal Farm

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On the other hand, I see that today’s weather is predicted to be mostly mild and dry, in Dublin at least, with a balmy 12 degrees around parade time. Last year was even more benign and I recall lockdown picnics breaking out all over the Phoenix Park in the late afternoon and evening.

Perhaps it’s climate change. Or perhaps the supposed awfulness of mid-March weather is a product of perverse national vanity. Maybe we choose to remember only washed out St Patrick’s Day parades of old in the same way we recall only hot summers.

Then again, I do have a distinct recollection of at least one March 17th, from about 20 years ago, when the rains reached Old Testament levels. There was supposed to be a spectacular light show on the river Liffey, with some kind of sun rising symbolically out of the waters. We waited and waited under our umbrellas but the sun must have short-circuited. Eventually it became obvious that the arrival of Noah’s ark up the river was more likely. So we gave up and squelched our way home.

The diluvial reputation of March 17th during the middle ages is featured in Chambers Book of Days, a Victorian almanac, which also includes a story from 1831 of a smaller but no less ominous event connected with this date.

That involved the discovery in Co Down of a snake, or a "rale living sarpint" as Chambers insists locals called it. This happening in the same corner of Ireland as the burial place of St Patrick only added to the sensation. Surely here was a warning that Ireland had strayed from the path of righteousness.

“One far-seeing clergyman preached a sermon in which he cited this snake as a token of the immediate commencement of the millennium; while another saw...the approach of the cholera morbus. Old prophecies were raked up, and all parties and sects for once united in believing that the snake foreshadowed ‘the beginning of the end’, though they very widely differed as to what the end would be.”

It eventually transpired that the reptile was one of six introduced to Newtownards by a man named James Cleland. They were harmless grass snakes, bought at a market in London's Covent Garden, and he had released them in his garden as a experiment to see if the soil of Ireland was naturally repellent to them.

When the first turned up – 5km away and dead – it was thought to be an eel of some kind. But after the great Belfast naturalist JL Drummond confirmed the worst, pandemonium ensued. So did the offer of a reward to anyone who found and killed other snakes. The carcasses of three more were duly handed in, leaving two at large.

It may be worth recalling that the more recent invasion of Ireland by grey squirrels began with someone deliberately introducing six pairs as a big house wedding gift in Longford in 1911. Those went forth and multiplied. The Down snakes seem not to have done so – yet anyway.

It was also a Cleland who built the original Stormont Castle, in whose grounds the perennially troubled Northern Ireland parliament building now stands. I don’t know if he and the serpent importer were related. But according to Chambers, with ark-like resonance, two of the original snakes were never found.

So who knows? Their descendants may lurk in the long grass around Stormont to this day.