Celebrations - St. Patrick's Day (East Auckland) Traditional Cache

DO NOT CLIMB DOWN THE CLIFF TO THIS CACHE!!!

During an eventful camping trip over the New Year’s period of 2015 into 2016, the S.E.A.C (South East Auckland Crew) made a New Year’s resolution that each member of the team would place a cache in 11 out of the 12 months of 2016. This is the fourth cache in a series that we (AucklandReindeer and chrisandmum) will place throughout the year for this particular challenge. Each cache will give some information about the day and the reason for the celebration chosen for that month. We hope you like it and will learn something from it.

St. Patrick is the foremost patron saint of Ireland. The date of 17^th March is the date that the Roman Catholic Church designates as the feast day for St. Patrick which is the date on which he died. The day itself is used to commemorate St. Patrick and his bringing Christianity to Ireland. These days, it is more a celebration of all things Irish.

St. Patrick was born as a Roman British citizen into a wealthy family in 385AD, his father being a deacon and his grandfather a priest in the church. When he was 16 he was kidnapped by Irish raiders and taken to Gaelic Ireland. After 6 years as a shepherd he was told by God to travel to the coast where a ship would be waiting to take him back home to England. When he returned to England he became a priest and returned to Ireland to convert the pagan Irish to Christianity. There is a legend that he drove out all of the snakes from Ireland, but snakes never existed in Ireland. This is an allegory about his driving the pagans, especially the Celts, out of Ireland and converting the rest to Christianity.

He used to use the shamrock to explain to the Irish about the Holy Trinity of God, one leaf made of three connected parts. When depicted, St. Patrick is often holding a cross in one hand and a bunch of shamrocks in the other.

The colour green has been associated with Ireland since at least the 1640s. On St. Patrick’s Day, green ribbons or shamrocks were worn, but in modern times, it is more green clothing. The fraternity of monks, Brothers of St. Patrick, used to wear green as their colour, but that soon changed to blue when the Order of St. Patrick was founded which means that the colour blue is often associated with St. Patrick.

St. Patrick’s Day is generally celebrated with parades, music, merriment and lots of drinking. The reason for the drinking is that it always falls in the liturgical season of Lent where there are restrictions on eating and drinking alcohol. These restrictions are lifted for this feast day, so people take full advantage of it.

This cache is generally accessible 2, possibly 2½ hours either side of low tide, otherwise you will need to be ready to do some wading. Please recover the cache with general leaf litter from around the area to ensure the integrity of the hide is preserved.

• Please replace the cache where and as you found it.
• Bring your own writing implement of choice.
• Co-ordinates obtained with a phone, so may be ±5m.

At the time of placement, the cache contained a pen, a log, some SWAG for trading, and a trackable (XKMFW4).