Slemish is a volcanic plug of olivine dolerite rising above the Antrim plateau. According to tradition, Patrick was taken as a slave to Ireland as a teenager and worked as a shepherd on Slemish for about six years, from age sixteen to twenty-two, for a man named Milchu. On the mountain, isolated and in hardship, he turned to prayer and received a vision urging him to escape to Britain. After becoming a priest he is said to have returned and founded churches in the north. A church at nearby Skerry is traditionally linked to him.
On St Patrick's Day, 17 March, large crowds climb the mountain in an act of folk devotion. The mountain was also a United Irish camp in the 1798 rising.
In the Glens of Antrim oral history project one speaker, Davy George McCrory, recalls four boys from Braid who tried to scare an old man on Slemish with fairy tales until midnight, and he sent one of them to fetch a three-toed grape from the byre because the devil visited at twelve and was frightened only by that fruit. The boys ran. It shows the mountain's place in local storytelling beyond the saint.
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