Culbone is found in Domesday Book under the name of “Chetenore,” and appears in old records as “Kitenore,” “Kytenore,” and “Kitnore”: “ore” standing in the Anglo-Saxon for “seashore.” The present name derives from the dedication of the church to “St. Culbone,” a corruption of “Columban.” St. Columban, or Columbanus, was an Irish saint, born A.D. 543, in Leinster. The author of the “Lives of the Saints” says he “seems to have been of a respectable family”; which was an advantage not commonly enjoyed by saints, as the histories of these holy men show us. The greater therefore, the credit due them for qualifying for saintship. Columban, as a student, came very near disaster. He was a good-looking young Irishman, and, as such, very attractive to the dark-eyed colleens of his native land, who interrupted his studies in grammar, rhetoric, and divinity so seriously with their winning ways that he fled at last, on the advice of a mystic old woman, to Lough Erne. Thence he repaired to Bangor, in Carrickfergus, and placed himself under the rule of Abbot Congall. At length, leaving this seclusion, he set out upon a life of itinerant preaching on the Continent, chiefly in Burgundy, whence he was expelled for his too plain speech, criticising the conduct of the Court. His last years were spent in meditation; and in peace and quiet he died at length, on November 21st, A.D. 615, aged seventy-two. Solitary places were especially affected by St. Columban, who liked nothing better than the sole companionship of nature. There is thus a peculiar fitness in the church of so retired a place as this being dedicated to him. But, quiet though it may now always be, Culbone was, in the eighteenth century, the scene of an annual fair that, for merriment and devil-me-care jollity, seems to have been fully abreast with other country romps and revels. The Reverend Richard Warner, coming to Culbone in 1799, in his “Walk through the Western Counties,” says: “Quiet and sequestered as this romantic spot at present is, it has heretofore borne an honourable name in the annals of rustic revelry. Its rocks have echoed to the shouts of multitudinous mirth, and its woods rung with the symphonious music of all the neighbouring bands: in plain English, a revel, or fair, was wont to be held here in times of yore.” In still plainer English, there used formerly to be a fair held in Culbone churchyard. Entering upon the meditations of the Reverend Richard Warner, striving to write plain English, and failing in the attempt, came an old reminiscent, ruminating blacksmith, with an artless tale, recounted, apparently, by the Reverend Richard as a moral anecdote.