Wales 4: St Catherine's Island, Tenby

St Elvan's, Aberdare, was the sole church I found open when I was across the Severn, and there were no images of St Catherine anywhere. There was, though, one very unusual Catherine site. 

A stroll across the South Beach at Tenby at low tide will bring you to St Catherine's Island. The mere name tempted me to pay my fee and ascend the slippery steps as best I could, battling my acrophobia which only gets worse as I age, to what turned out to be a 19th-century fort battened onto the rock: 'Napoleonic', they say, but usually neglect to point out that the Napoleon involved is III, not Le Petit Empereur himself. It's managed by a trust now, but has over the last century been a house, and in the 1960s and 70s, incredibly, a zoo. I found it a horrible place, and it was probably even more inhospitable for the animals unfortunate enough to be brought to live here than for the humans, who at least made the choice to do so. The journalist Norman Lewis rented the fort/house for some months in 1948 and remembered the wind battering the ill-fitting windows, and that Tenby town, no more than a couple of hundred yards away, could be invisible in rain and fog for days at a time.

But before the fort there was a chapel dedicated to St Catherine, hence the name, and a resident hermit at some point. Until the foundations were laid for the fort in 1867 the ruins of the chapel were the only visible structures on the Island.

Those remains were removed when the fort was built, and during the works three items were discovered. There was a human skeleton, possibly the body of one of the hermits; a scatter of Roman coins; and, of all things, an Egyptian ushabti dating from the 17th century BC. The objects were all taken to Tenby Museum, and the ushabti recently made a return trip so that visitors could see it. Here it is, in a snap taken from a short film on the St Catherine's Island website:

Now of course nobody knows how this utterly unexpected and inexplicable object got to a medieval pilgrimage site. But is there a connection? Could it be that some crusader, or other traveller, brought it back from the Near East, and that, coming from the vicinity of Alexandria, this indistinguishable figurine, so completely different from anything else anyone in the area would ever have encountered, was identified as an image of St Catherine? That's what they speculate on the Island, and I don't think it's so wildly incredible to dismiss out of hand. 

They have a wishing well on St Catherine's Island: but not even my fond fancy can re-imagine it as St Catherine's.