The story of the martyrdom of Donan and his fifty-two monks is attended by one curious circumstance, namely, that when the enemy came to dispatch them, Donan, who was celebrating mass, requested them to refrain from slaughter until the holy rite was over, and at once ‘they gave him this respite’. When it was over, Donan and his monks came forth and were duly slain, ‘and all their names are in a certain book of the books of Erin. A.D. 616’ (The Martyrology of Donegal).

Accounts vary as to the identity of the enemy. One record has it that the queen of that part of the world kept her sheep on Eigg and when she heard of the landing of Donan and his monks, she said, ‘Let them all be killed.’ ‘That would not be a religious act,’ said her people. But even in those early days apparently there were chiefs who thought sheep of more importance than men, religion or no religion, and so her will prevailed.

Yet to do the people of Alba justice, this is about the only real martyrdom of the early Celtic Church, and when we talk of savages and barbarians and the light being brought into their pagan darkness, it should not be forgotten that Columba and his men and their successors, over a long period, travelled the length and breadth of Scotland, to the Orkneys, to Ultima Thule, talking and preaching to folk who not only must have listened to these pervertors of the ancient Druidic faith, but manifestly must have fed them and given them hospitality. Indeed if we go back to Ninian (one hundred and fifty years before Columba), the founder of Candida Casa on the Solway, we have a period of several centuries when strangers with a strange gospel penetrated the forests and mountains and glens of Scotland not only with immunity but amidst surely a remarkable tolerance. For if the practice of the Druidic religion, then certainly more than one millennium old, centred round the burning of human beings in wicker cages, as our school books told us, it seems odd that all this human material, wandering like destructive birds into the dark Druidic cage, should have been spared. Pagan Rome promptly devised the sport of tossing Christians to the lions. Christian Spain achieved the monstrous cruelties of the Inquisition. And it is not so very long ago since Scotland suffered the incredible ferocity of ‘the killing times’. Compared with the religious barbarities of the modern age, these early centuries have an air of halcyon calm, of kindness. Even this martyrdom of Donan in a contemporary record is put down to ‘pirates of the sea’. And in yet another it is recorded that the queen had to call in ‘Latrones’ to do her bloody work, because her own folk refused.

Towards the end of the eighth century Norwegians and Danes started their murderous inroads, and from then on the old sense of peace and security vanished in that lust for landownership and power which is still with us.