Why not in Ireland? Giraldus Cumbria "Topography of Ireland" and snakes in Ireland

Even Saint George had competitors: he was not the only one who ruled over the kingdom of snakes. God found other saints who chose neutralizing dangerous snakes as their profession.

One English historian describes 16th-century Ireland: “Meanwhile, amazing things are happening in Ireland, since there are neither magpies nor poisonous reptiles there. And I saw stones that had the appearance and shape of a snake. The people in those places say that these stones were formerly reptiles and that they were turned into stone by the will of God and the prayers of St. Patrick.”

Indeed, in the mountains and valleys of Ireland one often comes across strange objects that surprisingly resemble petrified snakes. At the same time, there are no living snakes there. Until relatively recently, merchants from England traveled to Ireland for an unusual product - land. It was believed that she had the magical power of an anti-snake antidote. The British sprinkled Irish soil on their gardens and fields and believed that the “holy soil” killed snakes.

Residents of the Lérins Islands (near the city of Cannes) tell the same story about their saint Honorat, who also allegedly turned all the snakes into stones. However, Christians (as, indeed, in most of their other inventions) are not original. Even the ancient Greeks believed that the immortal gods endowed the land of the island of Crete with the miraculous property of killing poisonous reptiles.

Why, after all, are there no snakes either in Crete, or in Ireland, or on the Lerins Islands? Of course, neither the Greek gods nor the Christian saints have anything to do with it. Snakes are not found on many islands globe. They don’t exist, for example, on almost all Kuril Islands. There are no snakes in New Zealand, on the island of Madera. Snakes cannot fly: they were unable to move from the continents to the islands separated from them by wide sea straits.

“Stone Snake” is an ammonite.

What kind of “stone snakes” are found in Ireland, then? And not only in Ireland: for example, here in the Volga region and even in Moscow and Ryazan regions. These are fossilized ammonites, extinct cephalopods. They have nothing to do with snakes. Ammonites are relatives of octopuses and cuttlefish. Approximately 200 million years ago, ammonites lived in countless schools in all seas and oceans. At that time they were perhaps the most numerous inhabitants of the ocean. To this day, on the site of long-vanished seas, entire deposits of shells of these animals twisted in the form of a clock spring are found in the ground. They look very much like coiled snakes and are popularly called “snake stones.”

The sizes of ammonites were very diverse: from 1 centimeter to several meters. The shell of the ammonite pachydiscus reached 3 meters in diameter. But in the British Museum natural history A plaster cast of a shell fragment from an even larger ammonite is kept in London. It is estimated that the entire shell of this giant was more than two meters in diameter! If fully untwisted, it would almost be as big as the roof of a four-story building! The world has never known such huge shells.

It is easy to imagine with what reverence superstitious people treated the memory of the holy savior when they found the remains of these petrified monsters in the ground. After all, they blindly believed the legend, which attributed the extermination of “terrible”, but in reality completely harmless animals to the magical power of the spell of a “holy” man who lived 80 million years after the last ammonite died out on Earth and managed to petrify.

Original taken from vanchez in Giraldus Cumbria "Topography of Ireland" and snakes in Ireland

I’m reading Giraldus Cumbria’s “Topography of Ireland.”

This is an English historian of the 12th century who wrote down a bunch of tales about the animals of Ireland, about local zoophiles ( If a woman goes to any cattle to have sex with it, kill the woman, and let the cattle die. Because they deserve it), null-teleportation through a whirlpool, in short, all sorts of stories from and for stupid tourists from Ireland + attributed his observations through the keyhole. Actually, his book is the ancestor of all guidebooks from the Around the World publishing house.

These are the stories he has:

About poisonous reptiles, which, when brought here, immediately die; and about poison losing its harmfulness.

And it does not seem surprising to me that the country is experiencing a natural shortage of these reptiles, as well as fish, birds and any other animals. But what is worthy of amazement is that nothing poisonous, brought from anywhere, could and cannot ever be preserved here. After all, it is read in ancient writings about the saints of this land that more than once snakes were transported in copper pots for testing. But as soon as they swam across the middle of the Irish Sea, they were found lifeless and dead.

Likewise, poison delivered in this way, in the middle waters, the very beneficial air deprived of natural harm.

Bede writes about this, speaking of Ireland in this way: No reptile has ever been seen there, no snake can live there. For more than once the snakes brought there from Britain died as soon as the ship approached the shores and the fragrance of that air washed over them. Moreover, almost everything from this island helps against poison.

We have heard traders and explorers of the ocean assert that more than once, when ships were unloading in an Irish port, they found toads accidentally brought in at the bottom of the ships; which, when they were thrown alive onto the shore, immediately turned on their stomachs, which many saw and were amazed, burst and died.

Thus, it is known that, either through the merits of the saints, as the widespread opinion says throughout the world, either from some new and unheard of, however, most beneficial mildness of the climate, or from some unknown and hostile to poisons power of the earth itself, no poisonous animal remains here cannot, and any poison brought from anywhere completely loses all effectiveness of harm.

I remembered the episode from The Simpsons where Bart was bought a boa constrictor instead of a dog. The boa constrictor is wound around a drum, sort of like a fire hose. Seller: "How much boa constrictor do you need? Boa constrictor is $5 a foot." Pulls and cuts. (By the way, this is how real snakes are sold - the price depends on the number of feet/centimeters of length... it’s a shame you can’t cut them off).

So the question arose: why, in fact, are there no snakes in Ireland? In Ireland, banishing someone is a national sport after a good drinking session: at the state level they banished snakes, and at the local level they banished fleas and rats. According to the official legend: before the arrival of St. Patrick, all of Ireland was a wild viper, and he came and 1) drove all the snakes into the sea, where they apparently drowned 2) invited MEGAsnake to move for permanent residence to a new comfortable house (Just imagine, snakes lived there there’s civilization in the houses!), but he didn’t want to move for a long time - he sensed that the matter was not clean, but, a fool, he agreed, because Patrick told him: “Comrade, in short, you crawl in for a day, settle in, and tomorrow I’ll definitely let you out " The Snake's IQ was low and he crawled. Patrick locked him there and then threw him in Mountain Lake, where he sits until %current_ day%, because he was bad with logic: well, he didn’t understand that the cunning Patrick deceived him: tomorrow never comes, because when tomorrow comes, it’s already today. So there is definitely one snake in Ireland and he is extremely concerned about two questions: where is that bastard Patrick and when will your tomorrow come?

Well, that's not the point. By this logic, it turns out that Patrick was still in New Zealand (as you know, there are no snakes there either) and managed to visit the world antisnake tour, but he was not noticed there. So why are there no snakes in Ireland? Another version is that Patrick simply banned the fertility god Cernunnos, who was depicted as a snake (that is, the Irish saw snakes). CHURCHILL INVENTED IT ALL!

It turns out that global glaciation is to blame. When it happened after the SUDDEN extinction of dinosaurs (and snakes had just appeared), they had to urgently migrate to the warm south, since in the frozen earth there was no place to wait out the global cataclysm and it was generally cold. And when the glaciation subsided, the snakes were late - Ireland was already an island, and few crawled to England. What was stopping them from crossing? The pythons swam to the island of Krakatoa in 1908, but here it’s clearly less swimming? Okay, it’s cold, but what’s stopping you from sailing to New Zealand? The climate is better there and all that. Snakes don’t die in Ireland - there it’s such a joke to keep a snake at home, but among the naturalists of the 12th century they died, because they were carried in copper vessels and the snake was somehow not cool in the cold.

And then I also found information that there is some kind of snake there and lives well, but which one exactly?

Comrade scientists, associate professors and others - well, tell me what’s the matter?!

I'll go have a Guinness and listen to the Irish Rovers for the glory of Ireland!

Snakes are found on every continent on Earth except Antarctica, so their complete absence on the island of Ireland seems strange. What causes reptiles to ignore this region?

Firstly, Ireland is an island separated from Great Britain by a strait 80 kilometers wide. Snakes living on land cannot overcome such a distance. But why then do snakes live in Great Britain, which is also an island and separated from the mainland by a fairly wide English Channel?

The reason for such a strange distribution of snakes should be sought in the geological history of our planet. Over the course of its existence, the Earth goes through ice ages - repeated stages lasting several million years, when, due to a sharp cooling in the climate, significant growth of ice sheets occurs. The last ice age (part of the ice age) began on the planet about 110,000 years ago and ended about 10,000 years ago. Much of northern Europe, bound by permafrost, was finally freed from the ice that covered the British Isles.

Primitive tribes and animals began to migrate to the islands. But not all creatures could penetrate deep into the islands, where the cold climate continued to persist. Among them were snakes, which initially settled only in the south of Great Britain. The remaining glaciers continued to melt, gradually flooding the land route between Ireland and Great Britain. This is how the Northern Strait was formed between the two islands. Great Britain remained connected to the mainland for another 2,000 years, until it found itself cut off from it by the strait we call the English Channel.

It turns out that the snakes simply did not have enough time to populate Ireland, which at that time was still too cold for them for most reptiles. Snakes still managed to populate Great Britain, gradually moving deeper into the island along with climate warming.

For those who are not satisfied with the scientific explanation for the absence of snakes in Ireland, there is beautiful legend. It tells that the island was saved from snakes by the Christian discoverer Saint Patrick, who gathered all the reptiles on Mount Crow and ordered them to throw themselves into the water. Only one old snake disobeyed and remained on the mountain. Then Patrick had to resort to cunning and bet with the snake that he would not be able to fit into a wooden chest standing nearby. The snake, wanting to prove Patrick wrong, climbed into the box, which the man immediately closed and threw into the sea. This is how Saint Patrick rid Ireland of snakes.

Be that as it may, in fact, the absence of snakes is typical not only for Ireland, but also for such large islands, How New Zealand, Hawaii, Iceland and Greenland. But this does not always bring benefits to the territory. Accidentally got into wildlife a snake (such as one that escaped from a zoo or pet store) can become an invasive species and cause irreparable damage to the environment by wiping out native species. This picture is observed on the island of Guam, where snakes were absent until recently. But the brown boyga, which was able to climb trees very well, was accidentally introduced into the ecosystem, multiplied and became a real disaster for local birds, almost completely exterminating the bird population.

After reading my stories about Ireland, you might have the impression that this is simply paradise on Earth.

No matter how it is! Yes, I liked it there, but there are things that make this country very unattractive for tourists.

And here are some reasons to stay away from this country.

1. Ugly women

Perhaps the biggest disappointment befell me here. The Irish women seemed to be slender, red-haired beauties, but they turned out to be anything but. I won’t talk about everyone, but this photo shows quite an average image of a young lady. Blood and milk, of course, but very much for everyone.

2. It's cold!

“This is such a shitty summer” - I remembered this joke every day. I imagined that it wouldn’t be hot there, but still I didn’t take any sweaters with me. But in vain. If it weren't for the whiskey, I would definitely get sick. The temperature did not rise above 15 degrees, and this was in June.

3. Expensive!

Ireland is significantly more expensive than Great Britain, which, in turn, is more expensive than France and Germany. If you understand what I'm talking about. In the era of the “big euro”, this will not be the most economically profitable country for Russians to travel to.

4. Country Country

The same point was in the “pluses” in the post about reasons to. At the same time, for some this is a big minus. There are practically no big cities, with all that it entails. Many will simply be bored. The Irish do too, which is why they have one of the highest suicide rates in Europe.

5. Separate visa for Russians

Ireland is a member of the European Union, but is not a member of the Schengen Agreement. This means that to travel to the country you need to register separate visa, the usual one won't do. There is a life hack to come here with a British visa, but not everyone has this either. For some, this will be a serious reason to avoid this country.

And I just couldn’t think of two more reasons... can you help? What's wrong with Ireland? Why shouldn't you go there?

The photos in this report were taken with an Olympus E-M1 mirrorless camera. A test review of the camera will appear on the blog soon!