There’s a 900-year-old story about a king of Scotland and the lonely hermit who saved his life. Surviving only as scraps of tales and long-forgotten fables, the tale dates from the early days of Catholicism’s adoption by this scattered population — though the hermit in question lived by a very different Christianity.
The legend, which seems widespread enough to have some grounding in reality, goes like this.
The year was 1123…
… and King Alexander was afloat in a small fishing boat. His four crewmen were navigating the Firth of Forth, a wide estuary to the north of what we now call Edinburgh, when the weather took a turn for the worse. The waves grew into a frenzy, the wooden hull was overturned and the crew was lost to the deep.