Relying also on Jocelin's statement that Tabernise signified a "Field
of Tents"--"Tabernaculorum Campus"--and on his unwarranted assertion
that the habitation of Calphurnius was "not far from the Irish Sea,"
Usher pointed out Kilpatrick, a town situated between Dumbarton and the
city of Glasgow, as St. Patrick's native town.

Jocelin's "Life of St. Patrick," as Canon O'Hanlon has said, is
"incomparably the worst" of the Latin lives of the Saint, and yet it is
on this untrustworthy foundation, and on the contradictions of the
Scholiast, that Usher and Ware rest their respective theories. Usher
discovered a Roman camp at Kilpatrick, and found that the town was "not
far from the Irish Sea," and it is upon this weak hypothesis that the
Kilpatrick theory rests.

The Aberdeen Breviary coincides with Usher, and the lesson referring to
St. Patrick is as follows: "St. Patrick, the Apostle of Ireland, was
born of Calphurnius, a man of illustrious Celtic descent, and of
Conchessa, a native of Gaul and a sister of St. Martin, Bishop of
Tours. He was conceived with many miraculous signs at Dumbarton Castle,
but was born and reared at Kilpatrick in Scotland, near the Castle."

But if the Aberdeen Breviary asserts that St. Patrick was born at
Kilpatrick, the Continental Breviaries, as Colgan freely admits, are
equally positive that he was a native of Armoric Gaul.

Cardinal Moran, in an article contributed to the _Dublin Review_ in the
spring of 1880, insisted rightly that the solution of the difficulty is
to be found in the word Bonaven. Bon, or Ban, he tells us, is a Celtic
word which signifies the mouth of a river, and Avon is the river
itself. From this, he argues that the Saint was born at a town which