St. Patrick? Is this possible? Am I reading this correctly? YES. St. Patrick COULD well have been from our local area.
St. Partick’s Day is widely celebrated now but for Why? St. Patrick is known for being the First Bishop of Armagh or the Primate of Ireland. He basically took Catholicism to Ireland and spread it around. Historians can’t agree when this was but it was way back fam. Like 1500 years or more.
Legend has it that Patrick had a flute or something magical and drove all the snakes from Ireland. He probably did some other stuff but where Guinness was involved – no-one can really say for sure what’s what ya know. And that’s one of the reason’s that the day is so widely celebrated. It’s about the time that all the barrels of Guinness bought for New Year’s Eve – go out of date and the Guinness company needed some way to drive more sales, shift the old stock…
That’s probably not the only reason that we still celebrate paddy’s day – BUT how do we get the local link.
Ravenglass Dock
Historians can’t agree on many things BUT they do agree that the man came across from England as a missionary. His Father was a priest in the local area and he sailed from ravenglass dock which was a bigger setting off point for the area than the smaller port of skipool. The site where now stands the Thornton Lodge Pub was once known as the Buccaneer and along with the Wardleys creek pub over the river – both served as setting off points for press gangs and in at least one documented instance a slave ship. Smugglers also used The Wardleys Creek over the river as kind of a wild west saloon.
OK so St. Patrick could have been from anywhere in England. BUT we like to think that twinned with the fact that DUBLIN translates from gaelic into English as Black pool – we have a strong tie to the tradition. (The tradition of drinking Guinness for the day anyway)
It doesn’t matter WHY you celebrate St. Patrick’s Day, Maybe you’re a 1/4 Irish on your dogs side – Maybe you were in Dublin once when It was St. Patricks Day. What matters is that you enjoy yourself safely.
A simple google search lead us to all the information we have used in this article and we think that it’s pretty easy putting stuff like this together. If you enjoyed writing at any point in your life – Writing for the BPL Bible could well be as rewarding. To find out if you’ve got what it takes to join our team – Write us a 300 word piece about something that you are passionate about in town and email it to info@theBPLbible.co.uk – We will respond to all submissions sent.
