Ninian consecrated a graveyard beside the Molendinar at Cathures, now
Glasgow. About a hundred years later Kentigern, otherwise Mungo, bishop
of the Strathclyde kingdom, brought to this cemetery from Carnock the
body of Fergus, an anchorite, on a cart drawn by two wild bulls. Over
the spot where Fergus was buried was built, at a later date, the crypt
of what was to have been the south transept of the cathedral, had that
portion of the structure ever been reared. The crypt is now popularly
called Blackadder's Aisle, though, as Dr. Andrew MacGeorge points
out in his "Old Glasgow," it ought to be called Fergus' Isle. It was
so named in a minute of the kirk-session in 1648, and an inscription
in long Gothic letters on a stone in the roof of the aisle tells the
same tale. Kentigern took up his abode on the banks of the Molendinar,
and gathered round him a company of monks, each dwelling in a separate
hut. In the twelfth century the spot was surrounded by a dense forest,
and in 1500 the "Arbores sancti Kentigerni" were landmarks in the
district. Kentigern's Well, now in the lower church of the cathedral,
must, from the very fact of its inclusion within the building, have
been deemed sacred before the cathedral was reared. Other examples of
wells within churches are on record, though not in Scotland. There is a
spring in St. Patrick's Cathedral, Dublin. The cathedrals of Carlisle,
Winchester, and Canterbury, and the minsters of York and Beverley,
as well as one of two English parish churches, either now have or
once had wells within their walls. The Rev. T. F. Thiselton Dyer
gives several examples in his "Church Lore Gleanings," and remarks,
"Such wells may have been of special service in Border churches,
which, like the cathedral of Carlisle, served as places of refuge
for the inhabitants in case of sudden alarm or foray."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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