Columba and the Beast in the River Ness

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A man is standing at the edge of a river in the north of Scotland, in his underclothes, and he is thinking that this is not what he had in mind when he joined a monastery.

The water is brown and cold and not in any hurry. On the far bank there is a small boat, tied to a stake. On this bank there are about a dozen monks, a few curious people from the district, and a very old man in a rough wool robe who has just asked him a favour.

The favour is that he swim across and fetch the boat.

He is a strong swimmer. That is the problem. Everybody knows he is a strong swimmer, which is how he came to be standing here, in his underclothes, while the old man smiles at him very kindly.

And somewhere under the brown water, something large has just turned over.

But we're getting ahead of ourselves.

Hello, and welcome to Saints by Candlelight, stories of saints, angels and patriarchs from the Catholic and Orthodox traditions, told for bedtime. These episodes are written by an AI and read by a synthetic voice, and they try very hard to be faithful. Tonight's story is about Saint Columba of Iona, who is loved in both the Catholic and the Orthodox churches, and it comes from a book written by one of his own successors, about a hundred years after he died. Some of it is history, some of it is the sort of story monks told each other in the evenings, and I will tell you which is which. A few of the small conversations are our own invention, told in the spirit of the original. So get comfortable. Dim the lights. And let's begin.

Let me start a long way south of that river, and a long time before.

About the year five hundred and twenty-one, in the north-west of Ireland, in what is now County Donegal, a baby was born into one of the great ruling families of the island. His family were the Uí Néill, and they had the sort of ancestors who are remembered in long poems. If things had gone the ordinary way, he would have grown up to be a chieftain, or a chieftain's right-hand man, and spent his life arguing about cattle.

He was baptised, the old books say, with the name Colmcille, which is Irish for the dove of the church. We know him by the Latin version of the dove, Columba. A dove is a gentle bird, and the name turned out to be a little bit of a joke, because as we shall see, our saint was not always gentle. He was tall, and strong, and loud, and he had a voice that the old books say could be heard a mile away across the water. Imagine a very holy foghorn.

He grew up, as many young people of rank did in those days, among the monasteries. This was the great age of Irish monasteries. Ireland had been Christian for about a century, since Saint Patrick and the others, and it had taken to the faith with enormous enthusiasm. If you want a modern comparison, think of the way a whole country can fall in love with a football team, except that the team was the Church, and the stadiums were little clusters of wooden huts and round cells on hillsides, full of young men and women who had decided to give their lives to prayer, and to copying books.

Columba became a monk, and a priest, and then a founder. In Ireland he set up monasteries of his own, one after another, at places with lovely names that you can still visit: Derry, which means the oak wood, and Durrow, and Kells. He was, by all accounts, a busy man and a good organiser. He also loved books so much that the old stories say he could not see a good one without wanting to copy it. That will matter later, in the last part of our story, so keep it in the back of your mind.

Now. In the year five hundred and sixty-three, when Columba was about forty-two, he got into a ship and left Ireland, and he never lived there again.

Why he left is a question people have been asking for fourteen hundred years. A later tradition, from several centuries after his death, says it was a penance. The story goes that there had been a quarrel over a copied book, and then a battle, and that Columba felt responsible for the men who died, and was told by a wise old confessor to go into exile for Christ, and to win as many souls as had been lost. It is a good story. It may even be true. But Adomnán, who wrote the earliest full account of Columba's life, and who was himself a successor of Columba, says only that he sailed away, wishing to be a pilgrim for Christ.

I will tell you what I think, which is only my opinion. I think that what we can honestly say is this. He went, with twelve companions, in a boat made of hide stretched over a wooden frame, a boat that the Irish called a currach, and which I can tell you from experience looks exactly as safe as it sounds. They crossed the stormy water between Ireland and the western coast of Scotland. And they landed on a small island, about three miles long, at the end of a larger island called Mull. The island is called Iona. It is green and windy, with white sand and pink rock and a great many sheep, and Columba decided that it would do.

Here is a fact that surprised me. The first thing the monks did, according to the old tradition, was climb a little hill to see whether they could still see Ireland. They could. So they went further. It was not that they did not like Ireland, or that they were running away from it. It was that if you can still see home, then home can still see you, and a pilgrim wants to be properly, quietly, completely away. Iona had a hill that blocked the view, and so they stayed.

They built a monastery. A few wooden buildings at first, huts and a church and a barn and a guest house. They grew barley. They kept cattle and a few horses. They fished. They prayed together, in the middle of the night as well as the day, and they copied books, and they welcomed anybody who came, because in those days a monastery was the nearest thing the world had to a hotel, a hospital, a school and a library, all in one set of buildings. And as the years went by, people did come, from all around: from Ireland, and from the kingdoms along the coast, and from further than that.

Now, who lived on the other side of Scotland?

The answer is the Picts. The name probably comes from the Latin for painted people, though nobody is sure whether they really did paint themselves. They are one of the great mysteries of early Britain. They left beautiful carved stones, with animals and strange symbols on them, and they left almost no writing. The things we know about them mostly come from other people. They were not Irish and they were not Roman. They had their own language, their own kings, and, at that time, mostly their own old religion. Their strongest kingdom was in the north-east, around the great glen and the river we are about to arrive at, and its king, in Columba's day, was a man named Bridei, the son of Maelchon.

So here is the situation. A man from a famous Irish family has moved to an island on the Pictish border. He has a monastery, a number of monks, a reputation, and a very loud voice. The most powerful king in the neighbourhood has not been asked for permission.

Columba decided that the polite thing to do was to go and introduce himself.

Let me tell you what the journey was like, because it will help with the rest.

It was not a straight line. There were no roads in the way we think of roads, and the west of Scotland is not a gentle place. It is a country of long sea lochs, and mountains that go straight up out of the water, and moors that look flat and are secretly made of mud. The way from Iona to the king's fortress went by boat for some of it, by foot for the rest, and then up a long glen, which is a valley with a big lake in it, that cuts across Scotland like a scar from one side to the other.

Columba took a few companions. Adomnán names one of them, a man called Lugne, and that is how we know that the next part of the story was told, afterward, by somebody who was there, or who heard it from somebody who was. I am going to be honest and say that I do not know much about Lugne. Adomnán gives his name as Lugne, with a second name that means something like descended from Min, which tells us which family he came from, and nothing else. I will give him a personality, and you must take it as our own invention. I will make him a cheerful, practical man of about thirty, who was the sort of person who could be relied on to know where the food was.

Let us say it was a bright cold day, towards the end of the summer. Let us say that the monks had been walking since dawn, and had had nothing to eat but oatcakes and a bit of dried fish, and that Lugne had been quietly thinking about the possibility of a hot supper for about nine hours. The path came out of a wood, and there, in front of them, was the river.

It is called the Ness. It runs out of a very big, very deep lake, which has a rather famous name that you have probably already guessed, and it flows for only a few miles to the sea. It is not a huge river. But it is wide enough, and deep enough, and fast enough, to be a real obstacle if you have no bridge, and in Columba's day, nobody had built a bridge.

There was a crowd on the bank. Not a big one, perhaps twenty or thirty people, and they were Picts, the local people, in their rough wool cloaks, and they were doing something that Columba recognised at once. They were burying a man.

Adomnán tells us that the man had been swimming in the river, a short time before, and had been caught. Something in the water had seized him and bitten him, and dragged him down. Some men had gone out in a little boat to try to help, and they had managed to hook him with a pole and pull him in. But it was too late. He was dead. And now the people were putting him into the earth, with the kind of silence that follows a sudden, ugly death, when everyone is afraid to look at the water and cannot stop looking.

Columba stopped, and so did everyone behind him. And I imagine that the old man took off his hood.

There is a small thing here that I do not want to skip. Adomnán says that the monks and the locals stood together, for a while, at that grave. It was not a church burial, because the man was not Christian. The local people had their own ways. But Columba, as far as the story tells us, did not interrupt, and did not preach, and did not tell anybody that they were doing it wrong. He stood and he waited. A man had died. That came first.

And then, when the burying was done, he looked at the river, and then at the far bank. On the far bank there was a boat, tied up at a landing place. They needed that boat. The whole party had a king to see, and a river to cross, and no way across it except one.

Here is where I am going to give Lugne some small dialogue, which is our own invention. Let me just say that I imagine Columba turning around, and looking at his companions with a face of perfect innocence, and saying, in that enormous voice, "Which of you will swim across, and bring us the boat?"

Nobody moved. A gull went by.

And I imagine Lugne, who was thinking about his supper, who was a good man, and who also happened to be the best swimmer in the group, hearing a small, clear voice in the back of his head saying, "Do not say a word. Do not look up. Do not volunteer."

And then Adomnán tells us, in a sentence I love, that Lugne, hearing the command of the holy man, obeyed without delay. He took off his clothes, down to his tunic, and went straight into the water.

Now that is the hero of the story. Not Columba. Lugne. A man who has just watched a funeral for somebody killed in that exact river, and who has been asked to swim in it, and who does, because he trusts the person who asked. I think we should all remember him. It is a very small, very brave, very unglamorous kind of courage, the sort that most of us will be asked for at some point, and the sort that almost nobody writes songs about.

He swam out into the Ness.

The current took him a little downstream, and the water was colder than he had expected. The people on the bank watched without a sound. The monks watched too, with their hands tucked into their sleeves, and a good many of them, I think, were moving their lips.

Lugne was nearly in the middle of the river when the beast came.

I want to be careful, because the old text is careful. Adomnán does not give us a good description. He says that it was a beast of the water, and that it was drawn up from the bottom of the river by the noise and the movement of the swimmer. He says that it came up suddenly, with its mouth open, and with a great roar. That is all. It might have been a very large fish, or an otter the size of a calf, or a seal that had come upriver, or something that nobody has seen before or since. The writer does not say, and I will not guess.

What he does say is that it rushed at Lugne, in the water, and that the people on both banks, the pagans and the Christians together, were struck with terror. The distance between the creature and the swimmer was, he says, no more than the length of a spear. A spear's length. You know how long a spear is. It is not far.

And on the bank, Columba watched.

I think this is the moment that the whole story has been waiting for, so let me slow down. Adomnán says that the saint saw all this with calm eyes. He lifted up his hand. He made the sign of the cross in the air. And he called out, in that great voice that had been made for exactly this kind of thing, the name of God. And then he said to the beast, and I will give you the words as plainly as I can: "You will go no further. You will not touch that man. Go back, at once."

That is it. Not a spell. Not a thunderclap. It is a command, and a short one, given the way you would speak to a large and badly behaved dog that you have found in your kitchen. Notice one more thing, which matters to me. The saint does not claim the power as his. He makes the sign of the cross and he names God, and what happens next, happens because of that, and not because of him. A saint prays. God acts.

And the beast, Adomnán says, heard the voice of the saint, and was terrified. It fled backward, faster than it had come, as though it had been pulled away by ropes.

Lugne, in the middle of the river, felt the water settle. He looked behind him. There was nothing there. And then I imagine that he looked at the far bank, which was now twenty paces away, and that he swam the rest of the distance rather faster than he had swum the first half.

He reached the boat. He untied it. He rowed it back across the Ness, to a bank where about thirty people were standing in a state of the most complete astonishment. And then, Adomnán says, the monks, and the local people, all together, gave glory to God. They were, he says, amazed at what they had seen. And even the pagans among them, the people who had never heard of Columba's God, were so moved by what they had seen that they too praised him.

I would like to point out something about this, if I may. Nobody in the story is humiliated. Not the beast, which was only doing what it was made to do. Not the villagers, who had just lost one of their own and were grateful that no one else had. Not even the pagans, who are not made fools of. They simply see something they cannot explain, and they are glad.

Let me pause here, to say something about the monster. I can almost hear a question. Is this the Loch Ness Monster?

The honest answer is that it depends what you mean. The story takes place at the river Ness, not at the loch, though the two are only a few miles apart. Adomnán does not connect it to any larger lake, and he certainly does not describe a long neck or a hump. The Loch Ness Monster as most people know it is a twentieth-century thing; it came into the newspapers in nineteen thirty-three. People like to say that Columba was the first person to see it, and I think that is a lovely thing to say, as long as we all know that it is a thing we say for fun. It does not appear in the evidence. What we have is a medieval abbot telling a story about a saint on a riverbank, and a water-beast that was sent away. If Columba had a favourite monster, we do not know it. But the Ness is still a fine place to have an imaginary one.

Now that they were across, there was still the matter of the king.

Bridei's fortress stood somewhere near the river, probably on a hill above what is now the city of Inverness. We do not know exactly where. There is a hill called Craig Phadrig that has the remains of an old fort, and people have often said that is the place, but archaeologists are cautious, and so am I. What matters is that when Columba and his companions got there, they found it shut up tight.

The gates were closed. I think that Bridei, a clever king, had heard that a famous foreign holy man was coming, and had decided to let him wait. Kings in every age have understood the power of keeping a visitor outside. It is a very old way of saying, you may be important, but you are in my country now.

Adomnán tells us what happened next. It is a short story, and a quiet one, and I like it very much. The saint walked up to the great wooden doors. He made the sign of the cross on them. He knocked. And the doors, the bolts and the bars and all, opened of their own accord. They simply swung wide.

I have spent a long time thinking about how to tell this part, and I have decided to tell it simply, because that is how Adomnán tells it. Whether you think of it as a miracle, or as a lovely story the monks told, or as both, the effect is the same. The king, hearing that his gates had opened, was alarmed. He went out, with his councillors, to meet the visitor. And he welcomed Columba, Adomnán says, with great respect, and with the kind of courtesy you offer a man who has just shown that he is not to be kept waiting.

From that day, the old books say, the king honoured Columba all his life, and Columba, for his part, was an honest friend to the king.

Which is not to say that there were no difficulties.

Bridei had, at his court, a man named Broichan. Adomnán calls him a magus, which is a Latin word, used for a wise man, a druid, a teacher, a person who knew the old ways. He was Bridei's foster-father, which in those days was a very serious relationship, a bond almost as close as blood. And Broichan was not at all pleased about the new arrival. He had, I think, rather a lot to lose.

There was a particular problem. Broichan owned a slave, a girl, who had been taken from Ireland, and Columba, who was Irish, who had a very strong sense of what was owed to a captive, asked Broichan to let her go.

Broichan said no.

Columba, who was not used to hearing no, said to him, and Adomnán has the words: "Know this, Broichan. If you will not free this captive, you will not live."

That is a hard thing to say to a man. I do not defend the tone. But it is a more understandable thing when you remember that, in the eyes of the Church, then and now, a person is a person, and cannot be owned. In any case, Broichan did not release her.

Columba left the king's house. He went down to the river, again, to the Ness, and he stooped, and he picked up a white pebble out of the water. He blessed it. And he said to his friends, in words Adomnán preserved, that this pebble would cure many of the sick, and that Broichan would be among them.

And then something happened that I rather think the monks of Iona enjoyed telling for centuries. Broichan fell ill. Suddenly, and badly, as though he were at the point of death. The king sent riders. They found Columba, and begged him to come and to heal the old man. And Columba said that he would, on one condition. The girl was to be set free. That was all.

The king agreed. Broichan, who had run out of other choices, agreed. The girl was released and sent home. And Columba sent the white stone to Broichan, with the instruction that he should drink water in which it had been dipped. Adomnán tells us that, against all the ordinary rules of stones, the pebble floated, and that Broichan drank the water and was healed. And the stone was kept in the king's treasury ever after, and many people were cured by it, but only when God willed it, and not otherwise, and the stone itself had no power of its own.

I want to say plainly that I am telling this as a legend. It comes to us from Adomnán, a hundred years after the fact, and neither he nor I can tell you how much of it happened as the monks remembered. What I will say is this. Whatever happened, a captive girl went home. That is the part of the story that I am sure is worth believing.

I would like to say something now about the rest of Columba's life, because it was long, and it was good, and we have only been looking at the middle.

He lived on Iona for thirty-four years. He sent monks out from Iona to other islands, and to other kingdoms, and the monastery grew into one of the great centres of learning in Western Europe. Bede, the English monk and historian, who wrote the Church's history of England a hundred and thirty years later, tells us that Columba came to Britain to preach to the Picts, and that Iona ruled a great many monasteries in both the Irish and Pictish lands. That is real, and verified, and not at all a legend.

He wrote hymns. He copied manuscripts, a great many of them. He was, as everyone agrees, one of the first great lovers of books in Scottish history. In a very real way, he is one of the reasons that the northern part of this island kept its learning when so much of Europe was losing it.

And he grew old.

That is the part I would like to dwell on, because the end of this story is quiet, and quiet is what we want just now.

Adomnán tells us about the last days of the saint, in the third book of his Life, and I am going to read you the shape of it, rather than the words. It was the spring, or the early summer, of five hundred and ninety-seven. Columba was seventy-five or so, which was a very great age. He was too weak to walk very far. And one day he went out to look at the monastery's work, in a cart pulled by an ox.

He visited the barn. He blessed the grain that had been harvested, and he said, quietly, that he was glad, because if he had to leave his monks this year, they would not go hungry. They did not like it when he said that.

On the way back to the monastery, something happened that I think is one of the loveliest scenes in any saint's life. There was an old white horse that worked on the monastery farm. It carried the milk pails from the cowshed to the dairy. It was a faithful, worn-out, ordinary animal, and it came up to the saint, and it put its head against his chest, and it began to weep.

The attendant, a man named Diarmait, tried to drive it away. He thought that it was being a nuisance. And Columba said, very gently, "Let him alone. He loves me. Let him pour out his grief on my breast."

And then he told Diarmait what the horse knew. That he was going soon. The horse, which had no words, had understood what the people around him were trying not to say.

I think that is a very Columba thing, a person who could face down a monster in a river and could also be moved by a tired old horse. I think it is why people loved him. The dove of the church, with the voice of a foghorn, and a heart exactly the size of everything he met.

He went up to a little hill and blessed the monastery, and he said, "Small and mean though this place is, it will be held in great honour, not only by the kings and peoples of the Scots, but by foreign rulers and their people as well." Whatever else Adomnán may have been doing when he wrote that, he was certainly not wrong. Iona is still visited by many thousands of people every year. It is still a place of prayer.

Then he went back to his cell and began to copy the Psalms. He was working on the thirty-fourth psalm. He wrote the line, in the old Latin, which in our English is: "Those who seek the Lord shall lack no good thing." And there, Adomnán says, he stopped. He put down his pen, and said, "Here I must stop. Let Baithéne write what follows."

Baithéne was his cousin and his follower, and the monk who was to take his place. And the next verse of the psalm, as it happens, begins with the words: Come, my children, and listen to me.

That is as perfect a last page as I could invent, and I did not invent it. I will leave it for you to decide how you would like to hold it.

That night, a Saturday, at midnight, when the bell rang for the night prayers, Columba got up before the others and went into the church alone, and knelt before the altar. When the monks came with lights, they found him lying there. Diarmait raised him, and held him, and the monks gathered round. And the old man, who could no longer speak, lifted his hand to bless them all. And then, Adomnán says, he was gone.

He died on the ninth of June, in the year five hundred and ninety-seven. He had a smile on his face, the old books say, as though he had seen the angels.

And so he went home to God.

Baithéne became the next abbot, as Columba had hoped. The monastery went on, for centuries, through storms and raids and reforms. It is, in fact, going on now. There are people on Iona today who keep the daily prayers, in a stone abbey church that has been rebuilt many times. The sheep are still there. The wind is still there. And the ferry from Mull still comes across the sound, with a few tourists, and the occasional pilgrim who has come a long way to look at the sea.

His feast day is the ninth of June, and he is honoured by Catholics and Orthodox together, and he is one of the great saints that both families of the Church call their own, from the days before they were divided.

Tonight, when you are lying in the dark, and the house is quiet, I would like you to think of the river. Not the monster, but the river. The brown water, running quietly to the sea. A man on the bank with his hands raised. A swimmer, who was afraid, and went in anyway. And a crowd of people on both sides of the water, who did not agree about very much, and who for one moment stood together and said, thank God.

Slowly now. Breathe in. And let it go.

Now, some notes for the curious.

Columba is a real, well-documented figure. We know when he lived, what he built, and roughly where he went. He was born in Ireland in about five hundred and twenty-one, founded the monastery at Iona in about five hundred and sixty-three, and died there in five hundred and ninety-seven. That is attested by several sources, including the Irish annals, which recorded his death, and Bede.

The stories I told tonight come from one book, the Life of Columba by Adomnán, who was the ninth abbot of Iona, and who wrote it around the year seven hundred. That is about a century after the saint died. Adomnán says he used older sources, including written notes and the memories of the older monks, and I believe that he did. He was an honest and careful writer. But a hundred years is a long time, and the stories had been told many times by then. So I would put it this way. The journey to King Bridei is very probably history. The friendship with him is very probably history. The beast in the river, the gates that opened, and the floating stone are what the monks of Iona believed and handed down, and I have told them as exactly that.

The reason for his leaving Ireland is uncertain, and I have said so. The story of the battle and the penance is a later tradition, and I did not tell it as fact.

What we invented tonight: Lugne's thoughts about supper, and nearly everything he feels or says, the dry remarks of the narrator on the crowd, the gull, and the light on the river. The old story gives us a river, a saint, a swimmer, a monster, a boat, and a crowd that gave thanks.

If you would like to read more, Richard Sharpe's translation of Adomnán, in the Penguin Classics series, is clear and readable, and it has a good introduction. Or you might go to Iona. It is a very good place to go.

That's the story of Saint Columba for tonight. His feast is the ninth of June, in both the Catholic and the Orthodox calendars. Thank you for listening to Saints by Candlelight. If you enjoyed it, share it with someone who could use a gentle story at the end of a long day.

Here is a blessing in the spirit of the old Irish and Scottish prayers, written for tonight and not handed down from Columba. May the Lord keep you safe on every river you have to cross. May he give you a friend to ask you to be brave, and a friend to hold the boat. May he calm the water under you and ahead of you. And may you sleep tonight in his peace.

Goodnight, and God bless.

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