St Benwell was born sometime around 653 into a humble family who we know had emigrated from Scotland to Ireland some three hundred years before. This family, it is believed, had a once illustrious past, consorting it is said with princes and kings (even if these were only Scottish).

The story goes that an early ancestor, one Robert Banwal, was an out and out outlaw who had to flee from justice after an attempt on the life of his brother-in-law, to whom he was indebted.

This shadowy figure it was who through sheer waywardness lost the ancestral Castle of Balloch and had to wander a stranger in Ireland, then a land of wolves, boars and wild inhabitants who lived semi-naked in little more than mud huts (according to certain, mainly English, sources).

How he survived and indeed flourished to the extent of leaving offspring behind him is something of a mystery, and indeed the history of the family during the following three hundred years, up until the birth of St Benwell, is yet to be unravelled.

However, as has already been stated, St Benwell was born sometime around 653, certainly after 650, and most likely before 655.

Was his father a bus driver? The suggestion seems absurd. As is well known however, and documented in other works, St Benwell while still young (there are no precise dates for this) founded the Monastery of the Souls of the Outer Orbit, somewhere near, or perhaps in, the modern city of Belfast. As we know, at that time Belfast was barely a blip on the map, had they had maps, a mere scattering of huts near a sandbank in the middle of the river Lagan. The Monastery would have overlooked the river from the lower slopes of what is now known as Black Mountain, and must have been lovely, it has to be said (Boswell's reference to 'damp dive' must surely be off-beam).

Perhaps the most unusual aspect of the life of St Benwell (for an ecclesiastic) was that he almost certainly left offspring. We know this from a charter granting land to a certain Jonathan, including the Rath of Cool, which was witnessed by St Benwell in 700, and by, and this is telling, 'Robertus, nostro filos'. This Robert apparently lived close to the Rath, and may indeed have somehow inherited it in later life. Whether he was a relative of this Jonathan is not known, though there has been speculation that Jonathan may have been an uncle.

For a fuller account of the thoughts and achievements of St Benwell there are a number of excellent other works, to which the reader is referred.

Suffice it to say, according to the scope and intention of this small volume, that he, St Benwell, well, kind of invented predestination, omnipresence, secular ordination, and superannuation, and went on to not only found a Monastery, but to become a martyr for his cause. His was a ministry not so much concerned with life after death as with life before birth, indeed according to some authorities, with life before conception. The controversy of this latter doctrine especially brought him many enemies among those of a more conventional mindset (see, for example, an excellent history of dismissals out of hand of this doctrine by Toree and Chiselhed, Phob. of Git. 1998), and in our own day much opprobrium from pro-choice groups.

For further information on the life and work of this remarkable man, the reader is directed especially to a slim volume, writer unknown, called The Monastery of the Souls of the Outer Orbit - a Legend (benben, 2000odd).

© W G Galbraith 2007