The tale of the Scottish king and the hermit who saved his life
There’s a 900-year-old story about a king of Scotland and the lonely hermit who saved his life. Surviving only as scraps of tales and long-forgotten fables, the tale dates from the early days of Catholicism’s adoption by this scattered population — though the hermit in question lived by a very different Christianity.
The legend, which seems widespread enough to have some grounding in reality, goes like this.
The year was 1123…
… and King Alexander was afloat in a small fishing boat. His four crewmen were navigating the Firth of Forth, a wide estuary to the north of what we now call Edinburgh, when the weather took a turn for the worse. The waves grew into a frenzy, the wooden hull was overturned and the crew was lost to the deep.
Alexander however, frozen and near death, was washed up on a windy island about a kilometre offshore, where a lone hermit discovered the battered body of his king, and saw to it that he survived.
This was the island of Inchcolm, where the isolated holy man quietly followed the Columban tradition of worship — that being the dominant strain of Christianity in Scotland ever since an Irish missionary named Columba had arrived in exile from his native land 560 years earlier. Columba, a nobleman-turned-monk, founded a string of monasteries around Scotland, most notably his own HQ on the island of Iona off the West coast, and preached the gospels far and wide. So it was by the power of the Word, not the sword, that an unpretentious form of ascetic Christianity had taken root among this sun-worshipping realm of Picts.
It was from Columba that the island of Incholm had earned its name — from the Gaelic Innis Choluim, ‘Columba’s Island’. The great missionary reportedly stayed there for reasons that are now lost to history, and perhaps took shelter in the solitary cell in which King Alexander’s nameless saviour lived, and in which he himself now recovered his strength.
Back on the mainland, Alexander was presumed dead. So inevitable did this seem that his brother David, busy ruling the sub-kingdom of Galloway, was summoned to take his place.
The hermit had no boat capable of crossing the choppy waters that separate Inchcolm from the northern shore of the Firth of Forth, so he lit signal fires until eventually a vessel was sent out. The king lived — for now, at least — and David returned to his southern duties.
Inchcolm Abbey would be Alexander’s great gesture of thanks for his rescue, though perhaps that gratitude was directed more towards God and the island rather than the man who had nursed him back to health. Awkwardly, in spiritual matters it was the Roman tradition which came naturally to both brothers, not the Columban one of his rescuer.
The chance encounter that brought Catholicism to Scotland
Alexander and David had inherited Catholic proclivities from their mother, Queen Margaret. Born a Saxon in 1046, she had disseminated the ways of Rome within Scotland as the wife of King Malcolm III who, despite being a bloodthirsty warmonger, nevertheless spared her from a life of exile in Europe.
Incredibly, the young princess Margaret had been about to depart from England to exile in Hungary, when the marauding King Malcolm first clapped eyes on her, dragged her north and contrived to marry her. (Had her ship departed before Malcolm’s arrival, the story of Catholicism in Scotland might have been quite different.)
And so it was in his mother’s honour, that the new king David ensured an Augustinian (Catholic) priory was established on Inchcolm, when he inherited the throne just a year after Alexander’s fateful fishing trip. The institution grew in stature and influence over the next 100 years, becoming an abbey by 1235. Many imposing buildings were added during that century, including a large octagonal chapter house which still survives today, remarkably preserved despite repeated assaults by the English during Scotland’s Wars of Independence.
The 1790s saw the arrival of artillery on Inchcolm in case of invasion by the French, and more gun batteries were added during both World Wars — partly to help defend the Forth Bridge.
Fortunately, it is many centuries since Inchcolm has suffered any kind of military assault, and today it is home to one of Scotland’s best-preserved monastic establishments — just across the water from Leith and Edinburgh.
History does not record the name of the hermit who saved Alexander’s life, nor what became of him.
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If you’ve enjoyed this, you will probably enjoy The Story of Scotland by Nigel Tranter, where I first came across this snippet of Scottish history. If you order the book via this link, I will receive a small commission from Amazon. It’s an entertaining yarn rather than a dry textbook, well worth a read, and you will find some discrepancies between his version of events and others’ accounts. (For example, Historic Environment Scotland’s version of Inchcolm’s history on their website makes no mention of the hermit.) Hopefully you’ll find exploring these differences to be part of the fun.
