St Columba or St David. He does not even appear in the genealogies that the Welsh provided for multitudes of saints. After Bede’s time there is silence until the Englishman St Ailred writes of Ninian in the 12th century, with no known additional sources for facts. It is true, though, that verses praising Ninian were sent by students at York to the Englishman Alcuin, the culture tsar for Charlemagne. These were discovered before the First World War and are kept at Bamberg in Bavaria.