Path of saints
ious/depressed – we have to wonder how many of the soaring numbers of children contacting Childline (as widely reported this week) because of deeply suicidal thoughts have also been prescribed antidepressant or other mind-altering medication?
MARION BROWN Garelochhead, Helensburgh tell you that when you’re in that desperate situation, all you want is someone to speak to in person.
Asking the most vulnerable people in our society to telephone a stranger in the middle of the night will only go to further stigmatise and isolate them.
Homeless people deserve more than this, especially with winter just around the corner.
DAVID DUKE Founder, Street Soccer Scotland
Bernard Street, Edinburgh that the higher numbers are weighted. Surely not?
ESTELLE TAYLOR Blinkbonny Avenue, Edinburgh Although the news about the Forth to Farne Way (your report, 16 October) was welcome, the explanation was somewhat wide of the mark in describing the spreading of the Christian message in this part of Britain and of some of the saints involved in doing so.
Rather than being the “earliest days” of Christianity in Scotland, these saints were around decades, or centuries after St Columba first spread the Word in the early sixth century in the west of Scotland and also in the north to the Picts, if we ignore Whithorn’s even more ancient claims.
It is also worth mentioning that three of the four listed were Anglo-saxon saints dating from the time when the south-east of present-day Scotland was part of the kingdom of Northumbria, not “Celtic saints” as your article states.
It is, of course, entirely true that the Celtic Church was the most powerful influence in the spread of Christianity in Northumbria and the people who did so, teaching our ancestors to read and write as well were indeed Irish and, therefore, Celts.
However, the Church in Northumbria produced several Anglo-saxon saints of its own, such as St Bede, St Cuthbert, St Ebba (after whom St Abb’s Head is named) and St Baldred, who was actually called Balthere in his own day.
The significance of the pathway is that it reinforces the integrity of the north of Northumbria and the south-east of Scotland as one historic kingdom with an identity of its own.