St Kessogs

St. Andrew was not always the patron saint of Scotland. Somehow his followers ousted St. Kessog. Quite how such a thing is achieved is rather hard to imagine and, given that soldiers invoked the incumbent's name as they charged into battle, I suspect the champions of the new saint needed all their wits to pull it off.

Kessog was an Irishman who came to Scotland. His name is attached to Loch Lomond where he is associated with a monastic house on an island whose name says exactly that, Innis Taigh a'Mhanaich. He was killed in an armed skirmish not far away at Bandraidh. Here at St Kessogs I am just finishing the dykes. So far as I or anyone I speak to knows, the site of any chapel around here is long forgotten. But the name lingers. The cottage is a couple of hundred years old and older still is a medieval font built into one of the walls that was found a few years ago when a new door was put in.

St. Kessogs

This dyke is slowly dissolving. The bit without moss shows where a collapsed section has been cobbled back together but the whole thing is all over the place, swaying about like an old drunk. Bill Farmer tells me it is only about 35 years old so I suspect that it has little hearting inside to hold it up. In other words, it's hollow.

I took this picture and went down to visit Bill on the farm. I was riding a bike and a small crowd of birds feeding on the ground fled as I turned into the track. A panicked woodpidgeon crashed straight into a wire fence. He paused a moment, struggled over and dashed off leaving a couple of feathers behind. I went on. There was nobody on the farm so I loitered for half an hour and left. On the return and about half a mile away I bumped into Iain Mor. As we stood passing the time of day an odd sequence of noises came from inside a fir tree nearby. A grey creature was tumbling from branch to branch. I thought it was just a squirrel so when it hit the ground I ignored it but Iain Mor went to look. He emerged holding a woodpidgeon. At first it seemed fine and we were puzzled, something was wrong. It flapped sluggishly and its feet were curled up under its belly. Looking closely, the perfect shell of feathers was cracked. There was hole in the feathers on the back of its head. It occured to me then that this was the bird who collided with the fence and that the collision was more serious than it looked.