Of Saint Patrick and the serpents

A vintage stamp showing St Patrick with snakes beneath his feet. Photo: iStock

March 17 is among the biggest festivals on the island of Ireland (divided into British Northern Ireland and the independent Republic of Ireland).

It is also a big day of celebration among Irish émigré communities from Canada to Patagonia and from the United States to New Zealand.

The day is the feast day of Patrick, the saint who brought Christianity to Ireland over 1,500 years ago. He was not an Irishman to start with but hailed from a location identified by most scholars as being on the Anglo-Welsh border, near the modern-day English city of Bristol.

Born into a wealthy Christian family, Patrick was kidnapped at a young age and sold into slavery by Irish slavers who roamed both coasts of the Irish Sea that separates the islands of Britain and Ireland. He spent several years herding sheep in the far west of Ireland, before making his way home to Britain.

But there, he had a vision, commanding him to go back to Ireland and evangelise the natives who still followed the native Irish religion and prayed to a host of deities.

Patrick went back and ministered. Today, he — along with Brigid and Columba — is considered the patron saint and Apostle to the Irish.

Read Brigid’s Day: how a festival of fire and fertility connects Christian Ireland with its pagan past

Over centuries, several legends have developed around Patrick (Padraig in Irish). One very popular and yet intriguing one is that he banished the snakes of the Emerald Isle into the sea.

In the Judeo-Christian tradition, Satan, in the form of a snake, had tempted Eve to eat the fruit from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. This resulted in Adam and Eve being banished by God from the Garden of Eden.

The story goes that St Patrick once fasted and meditated on a hilltop on the Irish coast. One day, he was attacked by snakes. The Saint waved his staff and banished the snakes into the sea.

Ireland is unique in that it is one of the few ‘snake-less’ places on Earth along with New Zealand, Antarctica, Iceland and Greenland.

It hardly hosts any other reptile either. The only reptile native to Ireland is the common or viviparous lizard (Zootoca vivipara).

Read Bring back wolves, lynxes to Britain and Ireland, study urges

For the devout, the story of St Patrick casting the snakes into the sea is gospel truth. However, modern science attempts to offer some other explanations as to why the island of Ireland is devoid of snakes or indeed any reptiles.

A land bridge

Britain and Ireland are two large islands lying just off the coast of mainland Europe. Britain is separated from France by the Strait of Dover, which connects the English Channel to the North Sea.

Meanwhile, the Irish and Celtic Seas separate Ireland from Britain. Both the islands, along with several smaller ones are collectively known as ‘the British Isles’ (Or for the Irish, ‘British and Irish Isles’).

However, both islands were connected to the mainland at one time. In 2017, scientists from Imperial College London suggested that the land bridge between Britain and Europe was a ‘ridge’, a natural dam that prevented the North Sea and English Channel waters from mingling.

Half a million years ago, this changed. The scientists postulated that a ‘catastrophic mega flood’ separated Britain from France:

Our work revealed spectacular images of a huge valley tens of kilometres wide and up to 50 metres deep carved into bedrock on the floor of the English Channel. The carving of this feature around 450,000 years ago resulted in the geographical separation of Britain from continental Europe.

Meanwhile, scientists like the late Frank Mitchell of Trinity College Dublin and Robin Wingfield believed that till the Last Glacial Maximum or Last Ice Age, which happened 29,000 to 19,000 years ago, Ireland was connected to Britain, and thus to Europe by a land bridge.

The existence of a land bridge between the two islands has been a matter of scholarly debate within and outside Ireland.

Scientists such as R J Devoy and Robin Edwards, as opposed to Mitchell and Wingfield, believed there was no evidence of a land bridge connecting Britain and Ireland.

But if there was no land bridge, how did biodiversity colonise Ireland? Here again, there are a number of explanations.

In 2021, Ana Paula Machado from the Department of Ecology and Evolution, University of Lausanne, Lausanne, Switzerland, hypothesised that there had been an ancient land bridge between Iberia in mainland Europe and Ireland.

She deduced this by observing that while barn owls in northern Europe were dark rufous, they were white in the Isles.

A document by the Convention of Biodiversity also hints at the existence of a land bridge:

Due to the loss of the land bridge following the Ice Age, Ireland already has a much-diminished biodiversity compared with Britain, with only half as many plant and fern species.

But how does all of this explain the non-existence of snakes in Ireland?

“Snakes have never been native to Ireland. While they are common on the continent of Europe and a small number of species are native to the neighbouring island of Britain, no remains have been found in Ireland,” notes the National Museum of Ireland notes on its website.

But why Britain and not Ireland?

National Geographic magazine, in a 2018 article, quoted Nigel Monoghan, keeper of natural history at the Museum as saying that the British land bridge to mainland Europe sustained long enough for biodiversity to cross over and colonise the island successfully.

It thus has three snake species today — the venomous adder, the grass snake, and the smooth snake. Of these, only the first is venomous.

Ireland’s land bridge with Britain, on the other hand, did not last long enough for this process to take place, according to Monoghan.

Once the ice melted, the seas arose and the island could not be colonised by any species other than those who had already done so.

But while science and religion, both give reasons for no snakes in Ireland, this may not always remain the case. Already, snakes have spread across areas they are not native to as invasive species. The Burmese python in the Florida Everglades is a good example.

Britain itself is seeing an invasion of exotic snakes, as Down To Earth reported in 2022. It may not be long before the same happens on the Emerald Isle. Food for thought this St Paddy’s?

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