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CHAMBERS’S JOURNAL
OF
POPULAR
LITERATURE, SCIENCE, AND ART
CONTENTS
CAVE-CHAPELS.
BY MEAD AND STREAM.
LONDON HOSPITALS AND DISPENSARIES.
IN A FLASH.
SPIDER-SILK.
THIEVES AND THIEVING.
ST JOHN’S GATE.
’TWIXT DAYBREAK AND DAYLIGHT.
No. 33.—Vol. I.
Price 1½d.
SATURDAY, AUGUST 16, 1884.
CAVE-CHAPELS.
In the biographies of the saints of the earlyCeltic Church it is frequently recorded thattowards the close of their lives they left theirmonasteries and sought the seclusion of somelonely island or mountain solitude, in order topass the evening of their days in undisturbed devotionand freedom from worldly cares. Jocelinein his Life of St Kentigern also records that itwas his custom to retire to a cave during Lent,so that, ‘removed from the strife of tongues andthe tumults of this world, he might hide himselfin God.’ Such retreats, whether they were usedfor periodical and temporary seclusion or forpermanent retirement, were called in the ecclesiasticallanguage of the day Deserta; and thefrequent occurrence of this term in the topographyof Scotland and Ireland—in its modernform of Dysart or Disert—shows how commonthe custom must once have been. Sometimes therecluse erected a habitation for himself of stonesand turf, as St Cuthbert did in the island ofFarne; but frequently he chose the shelter ofa natural cavern or crevice in the rocks, as StCuthbert is also said to have done at Weem inPerthshire. As the veneration for the memoryof the saint increased with lapse of time, thesites of such hermitages naturally became placesof pilgrimage, and troops of devotees were drawnto visit them by rumours of special benefitsaccruing to pilgrims of weak health, or peaceof mind procured by the performance of specialvows. In consequence of the peculiar prevalenceof this mode of retirement in the primitive CelticChurch, cave-hermitages must have been exceedinglynumerous in Scotland. But the thoroughnessof the breach which the Church of theReformation made with the traditions and especiallywith the superstitious practices of the past,has obliterated most of the traces of this earlydevotion; and it is only in a few isolated andexceptional cases that any of its associations havesurvived to our day.
St Ninian’s Cave, near Physgill, in the parishof Glasserton, Wigtownshire, is situated a littleto the west of the wooded valley which terminatesin the creek known as Portcastl