St. Patrick and the Snakes
By Frederick Boyce
What really happened... or didn’t happen
Having had many close friends from Ireland, I can attest that the Irish generally
do not have much affection for snakes. Irish folk are said to be able to immobilize
vipers by drawing a circle around them, and the milk of Irish cows, as well as certain
blue stones found on Irish beaches, are said to be cures for snakebite. Irish air is said
to be so pure that no snake can stand to breathe it, and whatever else, is said, the fact
rernains that, aside from any imported indoor pets, there are no snakes in Ireland.
As everyone knows, St. Patrick drove them all into the sea in the late 4th century. Or
did he? A lot of things that “everyone knows” are not literally true.
In recent times, St. Patricks Day, the traditional observance of that fabled event,
has become a rather silly celebration of things of which most people who live in
Ireland do not partake—or much care for—including green beer, corned beef and
cabbage, leprechauns and phrases like “top o’ the morning.” It is widely believed
these days that St. Patrick’s dispute with the snakes was allegorical in nature, with
the snakes being a metaphor for ancient pagan sects—Druids—that stood in the
way of the early missionary and his desire to bring Christianity to that wild and
untamed island.
According to Book of Days by Richard Chambers, Patrick ‘met formidable
opposition from the Druid priests. So obstinate and antagonistic were they that,
despite his kindly disposition, he cursed the land, turning it into dreary bogs, cursed
the rivers so that the fish died, and cursed the women’s cooking pots so that their
water never boiled. He aimed an especially virulent curse at the Druids themselves
so that the earth promptly opened up and swallowed them. Finishing off in good
style, he drove out the snakes by beating on a drum. At one crucial point, he
knocked a hole in the drum-head, but an angel irrimediately appeared and mended
it.”
While there is evidence that Druids did use snakes in their rites as far back as
the first century B.C., there is no evidence that real snakes were ever kept by the
Druids in Ireland. The fact is that there have never been any native snakes in Ireland
at all. Other places on earth from which snakes are notably absent include Iceland,
Greenland, Newfoundland, Hawaii, New Zealand and Antarctica. All of thern, like
Ireland, are islands, and most of them, also like Ireland, have climates that are clearly
inhospitable to ectothermic or “cold-blooded” reptiles. (None of them, as far as we
know, were ever visited by St. Patrick.)
Ireland has but one native reptile, the unassuming European “common lizard” or
viviparous lizard, which is vaguely similar in size and appearance to the fence lizards
or “swifts” that we have over here. One big difference is that, whereas all of our
native lizards lay eggs, the viviparous lizard, as its name literally means, gives birth
to live young, a definite advantage for a reptile living in such a cold climate. Some
might point out, and rightfully so, that England, next to Ireland, is also an island
and yet has snakes, but it has only three native species—the European adder, the
little grass snake and the smooth snake, aH three of which, like the common lizard,
are live-bearers. Of the three, only the adder is venomous, but it is far from dreadful,
with fatalities being practically unknown, much the same as with our copperheads.
Shakespeare wrote of the venerable adder, and until recently a colony of them still
lived within the city of London.
So how did those three European snakes get themselves across the channel to
England, and why didn’t they continue on to Ireland? Ten thousand years ago,
Europe lay buried beneath the gigantic glaciers of the ice age. Ireland and England ,
were not islands at the time, but were still connected to Europe by land bridges. As
the climate slowly warmed and the ice melted, the land bridges were inundated and
disappeared under water. The land between Ireland and England was the first to go,
some two thousand years before England separated from the European continent.
As the climate was still very cold at that time, snakes never had a chance to reach
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Ireland before the 50-mile-wide Irish sea was created, but the temperatures warmed
up enough over the next two millennia for those three hardy species of snake to
reach England before its land bridge to mainland Europe disappeared beneath what
is now the English Channel.
There is, however, at least one well-documented case of actual snakes on
the original Emerald Isle (not to be confused with our own Emerald Isle, NC,
historically home to lots of snakes). In 1831 an Irish gentleman and something of
a citizen-scientist by the name of James Cleland purchased six harmless snakes
(most likely grass snakes. Matrix natrix) at the Covent Garden Market in London
and released them on his estate at Rath-gael in County Down. He was apparently
conducting an experiment to see whether or not St. Patrick had indeed rendered
Ireland uninhabitable to serpents. One of the snakes was found and killed a week
Ifter by a man who at first thought it to be some kind of eel, but it was correctly
identified by the eminent Irish naturalist J.L. Drummond. The news that a snake
had been found very near the burial place of St. Patrick created a national uproar.
One prominent clergyman preached that the end of the world was near, and
rewards were offered for any other snakes. Three others were eventually found and
killed. The other two were never found, but according to the Belfast News Letter of
December 9,1831, Mr. Cleland quietly donated two preserved snake specimens to
the Belfast Natural History Society.
Sources for this article: Venomous Reptiles by Sherman and Madge Minton; Book
of Days by Richard Chambers (published 1864); James Owen, National Geographic
News; Nigel Monaghan, National Museum of Ireland; Mark Thompson, clydesburn.
blogspot.com
Frederick Boyce is the staff herpetologist at the NC Aquarium at Pine Knoll Shores.
A nonvenomous European grass snake, one of the approximately 2,700 snake species not
found in Ireland, but very likely the kind of snake that was released there in 1831 by James
Cleland. It is, however, one of the three species native to the \JK.—Photo by At Hyde
REMINDER
HI *^2
11 A ‘
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Daylight Saving Time begins at
8 4
2 a.m. on March 11, 2018.
7 6 5
Set your clock ahead one hour
before you go to bed on March 10.