To the Island of Tides. Alistair Moffat

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To the Island of Tides - Alistair Moffat


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       TO THE

       ISLANDOF TIDES

      Also by Alistair Moffat

       The Sea Kingdoms: The History of Celtic Britain and Ireland

       The Borders: A History of the Borders from Earliest Times

       Before Scotland: The Story of Scotland Before History

       Tyneside: A History of Newcastle and Gateshead from Earliest Times

       The Reivers: The Story of the Border Reivers

       The Wall: Rome’s Greatest Frontier

       Tuscany: A History

       The Highland Clans

       The Faded Map: The Lost Kingdoms of Scotland

       The Scots: A Genetic Journey

       Britain’s Last Frontier: A Journey Along the Highland Line

       The British: A Genetic Journey

       Hawick: A History from Earliest Times

       Bannockburn: The Battle for a Nation

       Scotland: A History from Earliest Times

       The Hidden Ways: Scotland’s Forgotten Roads

       TO THE

       ISLANDOF TIDES

      A JOURNEY TO LINDISFARNE

       ALISTAIR MOFFAT

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      First published in Great Britain, the USA and Canada in 2019 by Canongate Books Ltd, 14 High Street, Edinburgh EH1 1TE

      Distributed in the USA by Publishers Group West and in Canada by Publishers Group Canada

       canongate.co.uk

      This digital edition first published in 2019 by Canongate Books

      Copyright © Alistair Moffat, 2019

      Maps copyright © Andy Lovell, 2019

      The moral right of the author has been asserted

      British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available on request from the British Library

      ISBN 978 1 78689 632 2

      eISBN 978 1 78689 633 9

      For Richard Buccleuch

      Contents

       Author’s Note

       Preface: A Short History of Lindisfarne

       PART ONE: TO THE ISLAND

       Map: Journey to Lindisfarne

       1. The Island of the Evening

       2. The Hill of Faith

       3. In the Sacred Land

       4. Soul-Friends

       5. In the Arms of Angels

       6. The Quiet Waters By

       7. Wandering

       PART TWO: LINDISFARNE

       Map: The Holy Island of Lindisfarne

       8. On the Island of Tides

       9. The Winds of Memory

       10. Duneland

       11. When God Walked in the Garden

       12. Crossing the Causeway

       13. The Rock

       Epilogue: Godless

       Acknowledgements

       Index

      Author’s Note

      One of my most treasured possessions is a small cache of letters. Written in a looping, spidery hand with sentences that turn corners up the sides of pages before abruptly dipping overleaf, they are full of criticism and advice. The writer was a retired librarian and borrower of all my books but I never knew his or her name. Received over a four-year period, all of the letters were signed A Reader and no return address appeared at the top of the first of many pages. Not that there was room for one.

      The last letter was never posted. It arrived inside another envelope with a compliments slip from a care home in Berwick-upon-Tweed. I took it that my critic had died before the letter could be dispatched and something prevented me from calling the care home to ask for a name. He or she had not wished to give it and I felt I ought to respect that.

      Most of the criticism was a helpful mixture of pointing out blunders, a wrong date or mistaken identity and suchlike, and there were occasional comments on inaccurate use of language and poor style. ‘Posterity is not an interchangeable term for history’ and ‘using a dash is simply slovenly’ or ‘try not to over-use the ablative absolute at the beginning of a paragraph’.

      His or her advice was to try to understand better the importance of place in history and to get out from in front of my screen and visit the sites of important events or where important people passed their lives. One letter surprised me by suggesting (or maybe insisting) that I should read the opening chapter of Daphne du Maurier’s Frenchman’s Creek, ‘a delicate and enchanting evocation of place and how it has been seen differently over the centuries’.

      Before I began work on this book, I took this unexpected advice and re-read Frenchman’s Creek. I was indeed enchanted once more. At the peak of her powers, du Maurier wrote about the Helford River mouth on the Cornish coast and the inlet that gave her novel its title. Almost cinematic in its imagery, the opening chapter is intensely atmospheric, a world of winds, tides and a silence broken only by the call of nightjars. Du Maurier moves seamlessly between Restoration England and the


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