The Life of St. Declan of Ardmore | Page 3

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Transcriber: Dennis McCarthy Atlanta, Georgia

source: Rev. P. Power. Life of St. Declan of Ardmore, and Life of St.
Mochuda of Lismore. London: Irish Texts Society. [Manuscript
4190-4200, Royal (Burgundian) Library, Brussels]

LIFE OF ST. DECLAN OF ARDMORE
(Edited from MS. in Bibliotheque Royale, Brussels).
Translated from the Irish With Introduction
by
REV. P. POWER, M.R.I.A. University College, Cork.

INTRODUCTION
"If thou hast the right, O Erin, to a champion of battle to aid thee thou
hast the head of a hundred thousand, Declan of Ardmore" (Martyrology
of Oengus).
Five miles or less to the east of Youghal Harbour, on the southern Irish
coast, a short, rocky and rather elevated promontory juts, with a
south-easterly trend, into the ocean [about 51 deg. 57 min. N / 7 deg. 43
min. W]. Maps and admiralty charts call it Ram Head, but the real
name is Ceann-a-Rama and popularly it is often styled Ardmore Head.
The material of this inhospitable coast is a hard metamorphic schist
which bids defiance to time and weather. Landwards the shore curves
in clay cliffs to the north-east, leaving, between it and the iron headland
beyond, a shallow exposed bay wherein many a proud ship has met her
doom. Nestling at the north side of the headland and sheltered by the
latter from Atlantic storms stands one of the most remarkable groups of

ancient ecclesiastical remains in Ireland--all that has survived of St.
Declan's holy city of Ardmore. This embraces a beautiful and perfect
round tower, a singularly interesting ruined church commonly called
the cathedral, the ruins of a second church beside a holy well, a
primitive oratory, a couple of ogham inscribed pillar stones, &c., &c.
No Irish saint perhaps has so strong a local hold as Declan or has left so
abiding a popular memory. Nevertheless his period is one of the great
disputed questions of early Irish history. According to the express
testimony of his Life, corroborated by testimony of the Lives of SS.
Ailbhe and Ciaran, he preceded St. Patrick in the Irish mission and was
a co-temporary of the national apostle. Objection, exception or
opposition to the theory of Declan's early period is based less on any
inherent improbability in the theory itself than on contradictions and
inconsistencies in the Life. Beyond any doubt the Life does actually
contradict itself; it makes Declan a cotemporary of Patrick in the fifth
century and a cotemporary likewise of St. David a century later. In any
attempted solution of the difficulty involved it may be helpful to
remember a special motive likely to animate a tribal histrographer,
scil.:--the family relationship, if we may so call it, of the two saints;
David was bishop of the Deisi colony in Wales as Declan was bishop
of their kinsmen of southern Ireland. It was very probably part of the
writer's purpose to call attention to the links of kindred which bound
the separated Deisi; witness his allusion later to the alleged visit of
Declan to his kinsmen of Bregia. Possibly there were several Declans,
as there were scores of Colmans, Finians, &c., and hence perhaps the
confusion and some of the apparent inconsistencies. There was
certainly a second Declan, a disciple of St. Virgilius, to whom the latter
committed care of a church in Austria where he died towards close of
eighth century. Again we find mention of a St. Declan who was a foster
son of Mogue of Ferns, and so on. It is too much, as Delehaye
("Legendes Hagiographiques") remarks, to expect the populace to
distinguish between namesakes. Great men are so rare! Is it likely there
should have lived two saints of the same name in the same country!
The latest commentators on the question of St. Declan's period--and
they happen to be amongst the most weighty--argue strongly in favour
of the pre-Patrician mission (Cfr. Prof. Kuno Meyer, "Learning Ireland
in the Fifth Century"). Discussing the way in which letters first reached

our distant island of the west and the causes which led to the
proficiency of sixth-century Ireland in classical learning Zimmer and
Meyer contend that the seeds of that literary culture, which flourished
in Ireland of the sixth century,