Scattery Island is the setting of a tale in which two boys drowned at sea are allowed to rise and speak with their parents before returning to heaven. The island’s shore, the place where the boys’ bodies are recovered, and the ground before Senán’s oratory form the successive stages of a story about grief, return, and the limits of earthly attachment.

Setting and the Drowning

The account appears among Irish stories by unknown authors in A Celtic Miscellany, a collection translated by Kenneth H. Jackson. On Scattery Island, Donnán son of Liath, one of Senán’s disciples, went to gather dulse with two boys who were studying alongside him. The sea carried Donnán’s boat away, leaving him unable to fetch the boys; there was no other boat on the island with which to rescue them. The boys drowned on a rock, and the next day their bodies were carried to the island’s beach.

The setting makes the island both the scene of an ordinary failure of rescue and the place where the story’s extraordinary encounter becomes possible. The parents came to the shore and asked for their sons to be given back alive. At Senán’s direction, Donnán called to the boys to rise and speak with them.

The Boys’ Return

The boys rose at Senán’s command and addressed their parents. They reproached them for bringing them away from the land to which they had gone, and told their mother that even the power and pleasures of the whole world would seem like imprisonment beside the life they had reached. They asked not to be delayed: it was time to return to that land, and God would ensure that their parents would not continue to mourn them.

The parents consented to the boys’ departure. The account thus makes Scattery Island a meeting place, but not a permanent refuge from death: the children return long enough to speak, while affirming that the other world is preferable to the life they have left. The book identifies this preference as a familiar reluctance to return, a feature it finds in both of the Irish accounts discussed in this passage.

Burial and Significance

After speaking with their parents, the boys went with Senán to his oratory, received the sacrament, and went to heaven. Their bodies were buried in front of the oratory where Senán lived. The story identifies them as the first dead buried on Scattery Island, linking the island’s earliest burial in the account to the boys’ brief return and chosen departure.

Scattery Island’s significance in the narrative lies in this conjunction of places: the beach receives the bodies and brings the grieving family together; the oratory becomes the setting for the boys’ final passage; and the burial ground preserves the earthly consequence of their death. The island is therefore not merely a backdrop to a resurrection story. It is where the living hear from the dead, accept their choice, and bury them.