Strangford Lough has many sea tales, and one attaches to Mahee Island and the early monastery of Nendrum. The telling in the Spooky Isles and Spirited Isle pages says a mermaid once rose from the water near the island and sang a haunting, beautiful song. One of the monks, entranced, walked away from his post and his prayers toward the shore, ready to follow her into the depths. Then the matins bell, the early morning call to prayer, rang across the lough, broke the enchantment and he turned back, pale and shaken. He never spoke of what he saw, though others whispered about the sea-spirit whose voice could drown a man's soul.
John Vinycomb's poem tells it a little differently. The mermaid, with a golden harp and golden hair, haunts the shore at evening. A holy monk follows her song, marries a mermaiden at the bottom of the sea and is lost for many days, until the chime of matins carries him back to the ground. His brethren think he is mad, and the abbot, remembering women's ways, confines him in the round tower where he spends a year ringing the service bell before he is shriven. Vinycomb wrote it as a poem on a local legend, and he painted an inn sign called The Mermaid of Mahee for an inn at Kircubbin.
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