in the encounters between saints and animals, the place of their meeting and the saint's miracle was very frequently the wilderness hermitage, and particularly in the ‘hermit and hunter’ stories it may be suspected that the place itself became identified with the miraculous. Indeed, in the Dialogues, Gregory the Great raises the issue of the posthumous miraculous powers of the saints, having his pupil ask why saints ‘perform greater miracles in those places where they are not actually buried’. The problem arose in a story of a mad woman who had stumbled unknowingly into the deserted cave of Subiaco where Saint Benedict had lived as a hermit. Gregory uses this story to teach the notion of the virtus of the saint, whose miraculous power was not tied to relics. The miracle itself was designed, according to Gregory, to prove to ‘weak minds’ that a saint need not be physically present to be ‘listening’. Yet the story itself reads more easily as evidence of an underlying belief in the power of the holy place. It is likely that belief in the sanctity and power of Benedict's hermitage led to the creation of the story in the first place, and Gregory simply adapted the story to the message he wished to teach. Naturally, the miraculous literature left by the medieval Church emphasises relics and cult sites under the Church's own control. However, an exception is Saint Cuthbert's seventh-century hermitage of Farne Island, off the Northumbrian coast, where a number of his animal miracles were located. Here the relationship between popular belief, hagiography and the hermitage itself can be explored.