THE SCENE: One of the most persistent medieval legends about Ireland is that it not only does not possess any venomous animals, but that something about the island activily destroys poison.
THE TEXT: This fact is truly astonishing, namely, that if a poisonous thing is brought here from elsewhere, the island cannot, and never could, endure to keep it.
One reads in the ancient writings of the saints of that land that sometimes, by way of a test, snakes have been imported in bronze containers. But as soon as they reached the middle of the Irish Sea they were found to be lifeless and dead. And similarly if poison is brought in, it loses its natural force in the middle of its voyage through the operations of a kindly breeze. I have heard merchants that ply their trade on the seas say that sometimes, when they had unloaded their cargoes at an Irish port, they found toads brought in by chance in the bottom of the holds. They threw them out still living on to the land; but immediately they turned their bellies up, burst in the middle, and died, while everybody saw and wondered.
It is clear then, that, whether because of a clemency in the air that is, indeed, something new and never heard of before, but is nevertheless benign, or some hidden force of the land itself that is inimical to poisons, no poisonous animal can live here. And if poison be brought in, no matter what it be, from elsewhere, immediately it loses all the force of its evil.
Indeed the soil of this land is so inimical to poison that, if gardens or any other places of other countries are sprinkled with it, it drives all poisonous reptiles far away.
– The History and Topography of Ireland, Gerald of Wales, 12th Century AD
