There is a late-medieval Latin Vita, preserved among the records of the Franciscan Convent in Dublin, edited by John Colgan as part of the Acta Sanctorum Hiberniae.

[4] The Vita also contains a number of legends which, according to Colgan's co-editor Francis Baert, are of "doubtful veracity", but were kept in the 17th-century edition because they were assumed to date to the medieval period.

[5] For example, the text includes an infancy legend involving a white cow, said to have come to his parents' house every morning and evening, which supplied the milk for the baby.

He lived as a hermit in a partially man-made cave (sometimes incorrectly described as a Bronze Age tomb) now known as St. Kevin's Bed, to which he was led, in the account of the Vita, by an angel.

[6] There is a legend that claims that Laurence O'Toole used the "bed" as he frequently made penitential visits to Glendalough, especially during the season of Lent.

[7] Michael Dwyer, the famous Wicklow rebel, is reputed to have taken shelter in the "bed" while he was on the run from British soldiers.

Having firmly established his community, he retired into solitude for four years and only returned to Glendalough at the earnest request of his monks.

[8] A series of paintings by the Welsh artist Clive Hicks-Jenkins around 2009 depicted the story of Kevin and the blackbird through Heaney's poem.

This is commemorated in a folk song about him, "The Glendalough Saint," which describes a legend claiming that he drowned a woman who attempted to seduce him.

The opening verse is as follows: "In Glendalough lived an auld saint, renowned for his learning and piety, his manners were curious and quaint, and he looked upon girls with disparity."