Weekly Round-Up 24/10-30/10

Scotland's Saints this week.

St Bean, 11th Century, Feast Day 26th October

St Bean is a bit tricky to ascertain or track down. One story speaks of him being installed as Bishop of Mortlach in Banffshire in the 11th Century and another as an Irish missionary of a much earlier date. No doubt we are seeing the entangling of two Beans here but the question is which places are associated with which Bean? In Mortlach it is said he lived at Balvanie, near Mortlach (Bal-beni-mor which means 'the dwelling of Bean the Great’). We know nothing of this 11th Century Saint. But then we see his name crop up in western Inverness-shire near Kiltarlity. We also see him in Perthshire and in Kilbride. Certainly the Aberdeen Breviary accords this date as his feast. Other than that he or they are a bit of an unknown.

St Eata, 686AD, Feast Day 26th October

St Eata was not widely venerated in Scotland even though he was the first Abbot of Old Melrose Abbey after been a pupil of St Aidan on Lindisfarne. He would himself have St Boisil and St Cuthbert as his pupils. Strangely however, there is a chapel and Well at Alvie in the Cairngorms near Loch Insh venerated to him. The connection, as suggested by the authors of the University of Glasgow Saintsandplaces site is that St Eata had been Bishop of Hexham following some re-organisation of the Church in Northumbria in the 7th Century just when a Northumbrian King tried an invasion of Pictish lands:

If this is the bishop of Hexham and Lindisfarne (basically Bernicia, therefore) who died in 686, he was the bishop therefore when Ecgfrith led his ill-fated invasion of Pictland inn 685 and when he and his army were slaughtered at *Dun Nechtain. Eve Boyle (HES, pers. comm) has suggested that the battle was fought near Torr Alvie, on the summit of which is a large pre-historic fort (NH876088) which might be the dún in question. This background - or modern antiquarian speculation about it - might explain the otherwise strange dedication to Eata here. Click here for the citation.

St Talocran, 8th Century, Feast Day 30th October