It's the engines on History Hit. I'm Tristan Hughes, your host, and in today's podcast

well today is St Patrick's Day. St. Paddy's Day, it's the 17th of March. No doubt there'll

be celebrations across the world, in Ireland, in the UK, in Canada, in the US, in Australia,

and many other countries. There'll be lots of drinking, there'll be lots of celebrating.

I myself have participated in a few St. Paddy's Days over the past few years. It is a great

time.

Now today it is about time that we started to focus in on ancient Ireland. Ireland has got

so much awesome ancient history, and today we're going to be focusing in on the figure of

St Patrick. This figure who ventured to Ireland in roughly the 5th century, but did he really

bring Christianity to Ireland? Was he Irish? Was snakes involved? Were shamrocks involved?

To explain all, I was delighted to get on the port of cars. Professor Lisa Patel from

USC, Dorncyfe. Now with St. Patrick, I must stress right here, we don't have many sources

for this figure, and as you're going to hear, some of the sources that we have are written

later, and include many, shall we say, fantastical elements such as Patrick batting against

druids in these epic competitions, trying to take control of elements such as the web,

that they're quite interesting stories, and we definitely delve into them because they

deserve their mention. So that further ado to talk all about St. Patrick. Here's Lisa.

Lisa, it's wonderful to have you on the podcast today. I'm very happy to be here.

Now Lisa, the St. Patrick of the ancient sources of the earliest sources shall we say, there

are no snakes or shamrocks in sight. That is true. Snakes did not make it across the

land bridge to Ireland. Whenever they got there, it was after St. Patrick's time.

There you go. We'll definitely delve into that a bit more as our chat goes on. But I think

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