When Patrick was sixteen, he was captured by raiding Irish pirates, brought across the sea to Ireland and sold as a slave to Mieliuc. As a shepherd slave, he tended Miliucc's sheep on Slemish mountain in County Antrim. From Slemish it is possible to see Scotland on a clear day and five other counties. While a slave in a foreign country, Patrick experienced a profound spiritual change. He had never given much thought to his religion but among strangers "The lord opened the shame of my unbelief". The ardour of religious emotion, "the love and fear of God" so fully consumed his soul that in a single day or night he would offer a hundred prayers; he described himself, in woodland or on mountainside, rising before down and going to pray in hail, rain or snow: The years of bondage were also the years of Patrick's "conversion", and he looked back upon this stage in his spiritual development as the most important and critical in his life.