Note 577 — Chapter VII · THE COÄRBS OF COLUMCILLE.

Septimo anno regni sui reliquias Sancti Columbæ transportavit ad ecclesiam quam construxit.—Chron. Pict. Dunkeld was dedicated to St. Columba, and possessed some of the relics. Hickes, in his Thesaurus (vii. 117), has published a Saxon document compiled about 1058, giving the localities in England in which the relics of eminent saints were placed; and in it we find a passage which he thus translates:—‘Sanctus Columcylle requiescit in loco Duncahan juxta flumen Tau.’ This does not imply that his body, or his tomb, was there, but merely part of his relics; and that by Duncahan Dunkeld is meant—the letters ld having been read h—appears from an incident preserved by Alexander Mylne, a canon of Dunkeld, who died in 1549, in his Lives of the Bishops of Dunkeld. He says that in the year 1500, when a severe pestilence afflicted the whole kingdom of Scotland, the town of Dunkeld alone remained unaffected by it through the merit of its patron saint Columba, and that the bishop visiting some who were sick of the pest in the church lands of Caputh, administered the sacrament to them, and next day having blessed some water in which he had dipped a bone of St. Columba, sent it to them by his chancellor to drink and many receiving it were made whole.—Mylne, Vit. Ep. Dunk. pp. 40, 43.