The site of the villula where St. Patrick was born
French archeologists point out the “Hôtel du Pavillion et des Bains de Mer,” facing the sea-bathing place at Boulogne, as occupying the site from which Caligula’s tower, Nemthur, once lifted its head into the heavens and shed its light over land and sea.
On the frowning cliff which casts its shadow over the hotel there is a mass of hard brick ruins—the last remnants of the fortifications built found Nemtor when Boulogne was captured by the British troops in 1544.
Calphurnius’s villula was evidently situated somewhere on the plateau, called Tour d’Ordre, between the tower and the town, for St. Patrick, in his “Confession,” assured us that his father’s home was near to (“prope”) Bonaven, a statement which he would not make if the villula stood on the sea-coast beyond the tower.
It is, therefore, certain that the site of the villula still exists somewhere not far inland from the ruins alluded to.
Although Nemtor was undermined by the sea and fell into the waves in 1649, a picture of the tower as it once stood in all its glory is still to be seen in the museum of Boulogne, and the curator very kindly permitted the writer of this little history to get the drawing copied, so that the sons of St. Patrick might be permitted to view Nemtor, which Calphurnius lost his life in defending, and which gave a name to the district in which St. Patrick was born.
If this brief history of St. Patrick’s native town has succeeded in identifying ancient Bononia, now Boulogne-sur-Mer, as St. Patrick’s birthplace, then the whole plateau of Tour d’Ordre, on the north-eastern cliffs of Boulogne, where the villula of Calphurnius once stood, will become sacred in the eyes of the spiritual sons of St. Patrick throughout the wide world.
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