At low tide a causeway runs out from St Helier's West Park across the sand to Elizabeth Castle, and beyond the castle, on a lump of granite washed by the sea, is a tiny medieval chapel built over a cleft in the rock. This is the Hermitage, and the cleft is supposed to be the bed of Jersey's patron saint.
The legend of Helier, as summarised on Wikipedia, begins in Tongeren, in present-day Belgium, where he was born to pagan parents and brought up as a Christian by a teacher named Cunibert. After his father had Cunibert killed, Helier fled and joined the monastic community of St Marculf in the Cotentin. Marculf sent him to the island then called Agna or Gersut, and there Helier chose the tidal rock as his cell. From it he could see the sails of raiders long before they landed, and he would signal to the shore so that the islanders could escape. The Bailiwick Express adds that he lived on seafood he foraged, and that he was credited with healings, including making a healing spring flow.
Around 555, raiders finally reached him. They beheaded him with an axe, which is why the parish of St Helier bears crossed axes in its arms. The legend goes on to say that, weak as he was from his fasting, he picked up his head and walked to the shore. His companion Romard found the body and sent it by boat to the Cotentin, where a church grew up beside a spring. Jersey Heritage describes the martyrdom date as 16 July 555 and notes that an annual pilgrimage to the Hermitage still marks it.
A ghost has recently been added to the saint. Rick Hale, writing for Spooky Isles, says the raiders kicked the saint's head about like a ball, and that a dishevelled old man in tattered clothes has been seen near the castle, singing psalms and looking out to sea, perhaps still keeping watch for invaders. Neither the head-kicking nor the sighting appears in the older hagiography, and the article gives no witness. The saint is best understood through his legend; the ghost is recorded here for completeness.
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