Martin Crampin: 'St Cybi in Holyhead – and in Ireland' (2023)

Description

Lede
The name Holyhead in Welsh is Caergybi (the fort of Cybi), and the saint and his church at Holyhead is surely the reason that Holyhead, and Holy Island on which it is found, acquired
its sanctity.

Story
Most Welsh place-names that incorporate the names of saints occur in the form of llan with the name of the saint, and places named Llangybi (the enclosure, church or parish of Cybi) can be found elsewhere in Wales on the Llŷn Peninsula, in Ceredigion and Monmouthshire. The name Caergybi will have arisen because the church dedicated to Holyhead is located within the grounds of the former Roman fort. The name Caergybi seems to have been in use by the thirteenth century, although the records that provide evidence for place-names in Wales rarely go back further than the twelfth century.

Forms of the English name Holyhead, from the Old English hālig (holy) and hēafod (headland) were in use by the early fourteenth century.

The presence of St Cybi on Holy Island seems to be attested a little bit earlier in a Latin Life of St Cybi – a story about the saint that recorded his travels and deeds that was written late in the eleventh century or more probably in the twelfth century. After a prolonged argument with Crubthir Finta in Ireland, Cybi is challenged to leave Ireland in a boat that he and his companions had not yet covered with a hide to make it watertight. The boat is broken apart in a storm but Cybi arrives miraculously on Anglesey and he strikes a rock with his staff that produces a holy well.

According to the twelfth-century story of St Cybi, the saint originally came from Cornwall, but went to Rome and then spent nearly fifty years with St Hilary in Poitiers. Cybi returned to Cornwall and then travelled through Wales and to Ireland before arriving on Holy Island. By the later Middle Ages his shrine was a place of pilgrimage and the church was home to a religious community.

The presence of St Cybi in Holyhead was apparently brought to an end long before the time of the Reformation, when most shrines and relics of saints were destroyed. Writing in the early fifteenth century, Henry of Marlborough recorded that the shrine of St Cybi was taken away by pirates in 1405 and brought to Christ Church Cathedral in Dublin.

The series of images Esgyrn Cybi (The Bones of St Cybi) are based on the link between to the cathedral and St Cybi’s church in Holyhead. The presence of St Cybi can no longer be found at Christ Church and very little of the medieval church remains in George Edmund Street’s Gothic Revival cathedral of the 1870s, except some stone carving and some medieval tiles. Patterns from these medieval tiles are overlaid on patterns found on the late medieval stone carving from the south side of St Cybi’s in Holyhead, bringing together the two medieval homes of St Cybi on both sides of the Irish Sea. The images were exhibited with the Ports, Past and Present Creative Connections exhibition at Ucheldre in Holyhead in October 2022.

• https://perma.cc/8JH4-W499 (link opens in new window)