Note 107 — ON AN OLD STONE-ROOFED CELL OR ORATORY IN THE ISLAND OF INCHCOLM.[16]

In Scotland we have various alleged instances of caves being thus employed as anchorite or devotional cells, and some of them still show rudely cut altars, crosses, etc.—as the so-called cave of St. Columba on the shores of Loch Killesport in North Knapdale, with an altar, a font or piscina, and a cross cut in the rock (Origines Parochiales, vol. ii. p. 40); the cave of St. Kieran on Loch Kilkerran in Cantyre (Ibid. vol. ii. p. 12); the cave of St. Ninian on the coast of Wigtonshire (Old Statistical Account of Scotland, vol. xvii. p. 594); the cave of St. Molio or Molaise, in Holy Island, in the Clyde, with Runic inscriptions on its walls (see an account of them in Dr. Daniel Wilson's admirable Prehistoric Annals of Scotland, pp. 531 to 533, etc). The island of Inchcolm pertains to Fifeshire, and in this single county there are at least four caves that are averred to have been the retreats which early Christian devotees and ascetics occupied as temporary abodes and oratories, or in which they occasionally kept their holy vigils; namely, the cave at Dunfermline, which bears the name of Malcolm Canmore's devout Saxon queen St. Margaret, and which is said to have contained formerly a stone table or altar, with "something like a crucifix" upon it (Dr. Chalmers' Historical Account of Dunfermline, vol. i. pp. 88, 89); the cave of St. Serf at Dysart (the name itself—Dysart—an instance, in all probability, of the "desertum" of the text, p. 124), in which that saint contested successfully in debate, according to the Aberdeen Breviary, with the devil, and expelled him from the spot (see Breviarium Aberdonense, Mens. Julii, fol. xv, and Mr. Muir's Notices of Dysart printed for the Maitland Club, p. 3); the caves of Caplawchy, on the east Fifeshire coast, marked interiorly with rude crosses, etc., and which, according to Wynton, were inhabited for a time by "St. Adrian wyth hys cumpany" of disciples (Orygynale Chronykel of Scotland, book iii. c. viii.); and the cave of St. Rule at St. Andrews, containing a stone table or altar on its east side, and on its west side the supposed sleeping cell of the hermit excavated out of the rock (Old Statistical Account, vol. xiii. p. 202). In Marmion(Canto i. 29) Sir Walter Scott describes the "Palmer" as, with solemn vows to pay,

"To fair St. Andrews bound, Within the ocean-cave to pray, Where good St. Rule his holy lay, From midnight to the dawn of day, Sung to the billows' sound."