A Place to Take Off From

If I was going to live as a hermit I would be happy to build my cell next to the Velvet Strand at Portmarnock.

According to local lore, ‘There was a great saint named Marnóg living on Lambay Island. He had a little boat and he used to come over to where is now called Portmarnock. He had a little place for landing and the people called it Port’.

Lambay is now privately owned by the Baring bank family but much earlier St Columcille set up a monastic community there. Marnog (or Marnock) died in 625, 28 years after Columcille so maybe he had been a disciple.  In the 16th Century his revered remains were disinterred and transferred to a specially-constructed chapel in St. Mary’s Abbey, Dublin.

The site of Marnock’s church is just off the beach but many nearby residents probably don’t know it exists. (I lived in the area for ten years without being aware of it.)

What remains is the remarkably large ruins of a 12^th century church with great views over a golf course, the Velvet Strand and Lambay Island. Up to recently there also were a Holy Well and an Ogham Stone but they have disappeared. It is still a place to be and enjoy.  

The Ogham Stone indicated an early date for the site and the well was a reminder that while ‘clerics of the desert’ like Marnock based their lives on following the Scriptural path they had no problem combining this with their ancestors’ reverence for the sacred in water and trees.

As usual locals wanted their dead to be buried in such surroundings and the relatively good state of the ruins may be because they include the grave of a member of the powerful Plunkett family.   

In the 1930s the silence of Marnock’s  Velvet Strand was disturbed. Its long stretch of firm sand served as the runway for two historic pioneering transatlantic flights.  

The Australian Charles Kingsford Smith and his crew departed from there in the ‘Southern Cross’ tri-motor aircraft to complete a historic westbound transatlantic crossing to Newfoundland, Canada, and onwards to complete a round-the-world journey.

In 1932 the British pilot Jim Mollison took off from the same beach in a de Havilland Puss Moth named ‘Heart's Content’ to achieve the first solo westbound transatlantic flight, landing in New Brunswick, Canada.

Yet much remains of what attracted Marnock when he arrived on his ‘little boat’. 

Does anyone know anything more about him? His name in Irish is  ‘Mo-Ernin-Occ’, literally ‘Our Dear Ernin’ (the ‘mo-‘ being an affectionate term in the name of many early Irish saints).