Kildare, the cathedral and an elusive well.

The cathedral itself is something of a museum now. The original had been built, supposedly, by Saint Brighid, whom the museum and church readily admitted had once been a goddess. "That other Brighid," they called her, which is very similar to what my grandmother (not the one who is praying for me, although this one might be too) usually called a certain gentleman caller who happened to have the same name as my father. The goddess Brighid was a triumvirate, a patron of blacksmithing, healing, and poetry. The myths speak again of the split between the culture gods and the nature gods. War threatened, and Brighid volunteered to marry the wild king. If there was a line between two ideas, Brighid could be found there, blurring the edges of things, joining them. She was a goddess of fire and of water, of eternal flames and holy wells.

Christianity came to Ireland, and Brighid, in a move similar to the one she made with her marriage, apparently decided to become a nun. She was successful that time: the new faith came peacefully. This Brighid was the daughter of a nobleman and his bondwoman, thus making her a creature of neither class and both. At her ordination the archbishop of Ireland accidentally read the wrong vows, making her not a nun, but, impossibly, a bishop. He claimed that the mistake had been the work of the Holy Spirit and defended it fiercely, refusing any challenge that was raised. Brighid was a defender of the poor, as exceptionally generous with her father's money as saints tend to be, and the founder of a notable monastery. Bridging perceived divisions again, she made a monastic centre for women and men both. In the story of her founding of it, she went to the noble who owned the land at what would become Kildare, which means church of the oak, asking for a space for her religious order. He offered her as much ground as her mantle could cover, and she accepted. The cloth, thrown down below the tree, expanded to cover enough ground to build the entire large town. I believe this is traditionally depicted as a miracle, but I've always imagined that she was a clever creature and unravelled her cloak, making one great, single ring of the thread.

The church was interesting to me for how little of Christianity was in it. There were saints in the stained glass. There were alters and a lectern and ornate confessionals and the things that one needs for the ritual, but there was no crucifix. I only found two images of Christ in the building, in fact. There were animals depicted in the tiles in the floor. There was a nautilus shell raised on a small dais in the back. The baptismal font was carved of a single rough piece of stone.

Outside of the church I found an old crypt that locals apparently once called Brighid's kitchen. I climbed into it, blinded by the dark. The few pictures I took were more to see the cavern through the light of my camera than to keep the pictures themselves. I took the stairs down, under the earth. The bricks at the back wall of the place curved, their shape suggesting an oven.

I spoke to the woman at the tourism centre and was given a map that should have directed me to a holy well dedicated to the saint. In Ireland the wells are often flanked by a tree covered in torn bits of cloth. The cloth is a prayer, tied onto a branch. It is when the attentions of time and weather eventually cause the fabric to disintegrate that the prayer is thought to be granted. However, either the map was a particularly Irish one or any skills I may posses at finding my way were failing me. I gave up, not much disappointed by not having found the well, and returned to Dublin and my fabulously international hosts.