Travel is people. You may go abroad to see the famous sites, but what you remember best are the people you meet. Among them, like unex-pected treasure, are a few memorable contacts that will make your travels unique, special, and delightful. "People" is devoted to some of those you may come in contact with during your Home At First travels.

         The patron saint of Wales, Saint David, is not simply "veiled" in mystery. "Upholstered" would be a better fit. In the absence of primary historical records of his life, the sketchy facts about Dewi Sant, as David is called in Welsh Gaelic, have been embellished with legend, myth, attribution, and fancy. The resulting composite is more cartoon than realistic portrait, rendering David attractive to Welsh nationalists, Celtic survivalists, Arthurian cultists, and anyone looking for a factual figure easily moldable to the noble lost causes of the ancient Britons.

         The life of St. David of Pembrokeshire in southwest Wales mirrors the much better known St. Patrick, Ireland’s patron saint. Patrick, who lived about 200 years before David, also was probably born in Wales during a period of the Dark Ages when sainthood in the Welsh Christian Church could be bestowed on the pious and the devoted. Patrick, of course, has come to represent much of what we think of as Irish character: a gentle but firm spirituality guiding a simple, transitory life through challenges of poverty and oppression. David’s lasting image differs only a little from Patrick’s — David’s severe austerity and his aloofness lack the happy community associated with the itinerant Patrick. As a result, Patrick can be welcomed by all Irish — Northern Protestants, too — as a common cultural icon not especially politically charged. David, on the other hand, is associated with the oppression of the Welsh by a succession of invaders: Anglo-Saxons during David’s lifetime, then Vikings, Normans, and their English progeny.
        Like Patrick in Ireland, David was a traveling evangelist spreading Christianity among pagan Celtic clans. During the 6th century — a time when monks without a home parish could become bishops — David became a national figure who rose from simple monk to become the principal cleric (bishop or archbishop) of Wales. The factual story of David’s background and career ends there. The earliest surviving written history of David’s life dates to the 11th century, 500 years after David’s death. It is supposed that Viking raids may have destroyed any earlier biographies during the

ST. DAVID?

intervening centuries.

        History, like Nature, seems to hate a vacuum, and so the gaps in the life of David have been filled by apocrypha over the last 1˝ millennia. Over that time, David’s character, his past, and his career have been created. He has become known as a gentle holy man who followed a simple, even austere, lifestyle, devoted to a severe vegetarianism that relied on a diet of bread and watercress. Some say he often lived only on water, a claim sometimes associated with other hermit saints.
        Legend has anointed him with royal heritage, one violent and depraved enough to fit in with monarchies that have ruled elsewhere on Britain. The bastard issue of Prince Sant of Ceredigion, western Wales, and Non, local clan chief’s daughter whom Sant raped, David was thus imbued with both Welsh royalty and clan status. That Non — herself later beatified — was also to have been a niece of the greatest of all Celtic (or Briton) kings, Arthur of Camelot, further bestowed a revered Welsh pedigree on young Dewi.
        Much like St. Patrick across the Irish Sea, David pursued an itinerant missionary life after being educated in a monastery in southwest Wales. His mission travels took him through Wales, western England, Celtic Cornwall, and across the Channel to Celtic Brittany. Some legends insist he visited Celtic Ireland, too, and even made a pilgrimage to the Holy Land.
        After his wanderings, David returned home and founded a monastery by the tiny River Alun where the cathedral city of St. David stands today. The monks here practiced a disciplined and simple lifestyle, like David. Each day they rose very early for prayers followed by working the land, and tending to the many special crafts of the monastery. Despite their insularity, the monks fed and housed pilgrims and weary travelers, and fed and clothed needy families in the region.