Leonard, Hermit, 6th century

It’s been hard to find out anything at all about this saint, beyond that he was a hermit, and lived in the 6th century. He was a French nobleman who “went bush”. I’ve always been attracted to the idea of being a hermit but I think the lack of shops would do it for me. I took a course on the Archaeology of Scotland in my first year as a student (completely unrelated to my course of study) and the lecturer, who was no fan of the church, suggested that the reason the Celtic church had taken hold in Scotland rather than the Catholic church was because of the hermit-monk model rather than the centralised-administration model, which was more appropriate for the dispersed population of Scotland at the time. So there you go. Hermits as post-modern evangelism.