Well, we were not expecting to find St. Paddy in Northern Ireland, and truthfully we weren't actually looking for him. We just sort of stumbled across his trail when we were at Castle Ward. First, we happened to see this cute little church with the round tower. This is called Saul Church, or Down Cathedral. The story goes when St. Patrick felt called to return to Ireland (he had been a slave there before and escaped to France) to win the people to Christ, he first landed in this area. A local chieftan gave him a barn for shelter, and the Anglicized version of the Irish word for barn (Sabhall) is "Saul".
Just down the road from Saul Church is the largest statue of St. Patrick in Ireland. And here he is...
Apparently the statue was constructed to appeal to both Catholics and Protestants--it is wearing Catholic vestments, but the face was made in the image of the Anglican Archbishop.
So we thought we were done with St. Patrick after this, and were headed off to explore the little village of Downpatrick--where we found the St. Patrick Center. And a short hike up the hill led us to the purported burial site of St. Patrick. We wondered why St. Patrick was buried in the grounds of a Protestant church, but found out that the site was once a Benedictine monastery dating from the 1100's. A stone was put over his grave to stop early pilgrims from taking handfuls of soil.
St. Patrick came across the Irish Sea in a little boat like this.
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