Celtic Scotland : $b A history of ancient Alban. Volume 2 (of 3), Church and cultureSkene, W. F. (William Forbes)
History
Celtic Scotland : $b A history of ancient Alban. Volume 2 (of 3), Church and culture
Skene, W. F. (William Forbes)
Celts -- Scotland; Civilization, Celtic; Scotland -- Antiquities, Celtic; Scotland -- History -- To 1603
Such is the substance of these narratives; and here we are met, at the
very outset, by a great anachronism. Along with the lives of Kentigern
there is found a life of Servanus, in which he is made the founder of
the church of Culenros; but there is not one syllable about his having
been the master of Kentigern, or in any way connected with him, but the
whole events of his life, as there given, indisputably place him, as we
shall afterwards see, nearly two centuries later.[360] In spite,
therefore, of the statements of his biographers and of the belief of
popular tradition, the only conclusion we can come to is that Servanus
and St. Kentigern were divided by a more impassable barrier than the
river Mallena—the stream of time, and that they had never looked in each
other’s face at all. The scenery, however, of the narrative can be
easily identified. The hill called in the one narrative Kepduf, and in
the other Dunpelder, is Traprain Law, formerly called Dumpender Law, in
the county of Haddington. It is an isolated hill and, along with North
Berwick Law, forms a conspicuous object in the landscape. It is about
700 feet above the level of the sea, and on the south side it is nearly
perpendicular. It is distant about seven or eight miles from Aberlady
Bay, the Aberlessic of the older narrative. Culenros is Culross, on the
north shore of the Firth of Forth, here called the Frisican shore, as
the Forth itself is called by Nennius the Frisican Sea. The names of the
two rivers Mallena and Ledone are simply the Latin terms for the flood
and ebb tide, but the course of the two rivers, the Teith and the Forth,
seems to have suggested the legend. They run nearly parallel to each
other till they approach within three miles of Stirling, when the
southern of the two rivers, the Forth, takes a sudden bend to the north,
as if it would flow backwards, and discharges its waters into the Teith,
the two forming one river, but adopting the name of the former. Kernach
is Carnock, in the parish of Saint Ninian’s in Stirlingshire.
[Sidenote: Earlier notices of St. Kentigern.]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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