12 March 2025

Despite the difficulties we have in pinning St. Ninian down, certain things can be said about his influence in the church and its remarkable growth in Scotland. The first – many people were trained at Candida Casa. One of these was a man called Finnian.

Finnian established a  monastery at Moville around 540AD. He taught Columba. It was Finnian’s copy of the Psalter which Columba illegally copied. It was a scandal. The first recorded breach of copyright law! It had awesome consequences – a trip in a coracle to Scotland and the conversion of the West Highlands!

During the Middle Ages, the cult of St. Ninian not only satisfied the religious needs of many people, it also provided a generous income for all those who benefitted from it within the Whithorn community! Many people made their pilgrimage to  Whithorn.

Kenneth II went to give thanks after the Vikings were expelled from Galloway. Robert the Bruce went to pray for a cure for his leprosy. His prayer was unanswered. James IV and his wife made eight pilgrimages. The last took place the year before he was killed at the Battle of Flodden in 1513.

The pilgrimages of King James have been meticulously recorded in the ‘Lord Treasurer’s Account’. In her lecture on the ‘Medieval Cult of St. Ninian’, Daphne Brooke celebrates the king’s generosity ‘to pur folkis, to ane dum child that kepit the yet and to a woman that sang to the king’.

By the early sixteenth century, it was the most important shrine in Scotland. ‘Devotion to St. Ninian has left two legacies,’ writes Brooke, ‘a small, obscure body of liturgy specifically associated with St. Ninian and widespread dedications in his honour …’