Holy Exile

... In the fourth an fifth centuries Europe was flooded with Irish males who became known as the peregrini. The ordeal of going “overseas was thought moire effacious than exile within Ireland itself. Crossing water symbolized a threshold and the kind of spiritual cleasning the exiles were seeking. "

-- Gills, Islands of the Mind


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Bardsey Island off the St. David peninsula in Wales, where as many as twenty thousand Celtic saints are said to be buried, is famous for having “enjoyed an almost limitless reputation for sanctity.” It was even called a second Rome “in virtue of so great a concentration of holiness within so small a compass.”

-- ibid