To the Island of Tides. Alistair Moffat
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road to Dryburgh Abbey I came across something much more eloquent, a fragment of cut stone that was definitely more pleasing, clear confirmation that people had walked and ridden this way for very many centuries. Easy to miss in the left-hand verge, hard against the edge of the tarmac, sits a cross socket. Now filled with rainwater, it once held a tall and impressive cross that offered a place to pray and that marked a boundary. Abbeys, priories, convents, churches and other places of pilgrimage often lay inside a wide precinct whose outer limits were fringed by crosses set up by the sides of the roads that led to the sacred sites. Around Coldingham Priory on the Berwickshire coast, founded in the mid-seventh century and a place Cuthbert visited, there were at least three crosses at three approaches: Applincross, Whitecross and Cairncross. No more than this unconsidered little stump survives from Dryburgh, but there must have been others. When Cuthbert rode past it, he left the temporal world and entered holy ground.
Before a long avenue of trees wrapped the road in shadow, wide vistas to the south and west opened over the rich, pale yellow of ripening barley. Rain was gathering in the west, a grey veiling drifting across the hills of the Ettrick Forest and the shelter of the deep lane made it difficult to judge where the wind blew. I quickened my pace downhill to Dryburgh, noticing that gaps in the trees to my right showed what an ever-present landmark Eildon Hill North was. It seemed to be following me around the landscape.
Dryburgh is the only one of the four Border abbeys not found in a town and consequently its fabric is more complete, having suffered much less at the hands of stone robbers. After the Reformation, the masonry of the great churches at Kelso, Melrose and Jedburgh could be seen in the walls, and no doubt the foundations, of nearby houses. Sheltered by stands of ancient trees – one yew is said to have been planted by the monks in the early twelfth century – and surrounded by a vallum, a ditch deepened in modern times to keep out grazing and browsing animals, Dryburgh Abbey is a very romantic ruin, and also strange, other-worldly.
Many years ago I made a television series called The Sea Kingdoms, the story of Celtic Britain and Ireland. We filmed in Cornwall, Ireland, the Western Isles and in Wales. On our way out to St David’s in Pembrokeshire, surely the only cathedral village in Europe, we took a detour to a place associated with another early holy man, St Justinian. According to the map, near the coastal hamlet was an interesting series of prehistoric remains, a small stone circle and a dolmen, a megalithic tomb of two upright stones that supported a horizontal capstone. I thought some shots of these against the sea might be useful in opening credits.
The landscape was patterned by a warren of narrow paths threaded between rocky outcrops and tall clumps of impenetrable gorse. It was easy to become disoriented. Near the dolmen, we came across an unexpected small cottage with a fenced front garden full of colourful wooden objects: stripy posts, a large doll and a cart. Bunting fluttered on some of them. As our camera and sound men gratefully put down their kit, my director and I knocked on the door. Perhaps we were trespassing and needed permission to film. There was no answer at first, and then I began to make out a low drone, almost like a growl but not something that sounded like a guard dog. When there was no answer and we retreated, it was replaced by a high-pitched whine, a keening that slowly built up but did not seem to come from the cottage.
After exchanging glances, we walked back to the dolmen, wondering what we might meet around each corner of the path, shot some general views, packed up our kit and walked, quite quickly, back to the cars. More than strangeness, this little enclave in the landscape had a powerful atmosphere, something malign, and even though it was a bright day, good for filming, we all felt uncomfortable and were relieved to park at St David’s and set up our next sequence of shots amongst the crowds.
Dryburgh’s strangeness is not malign, it seems to me, but it is not a place of settled peace either. For some who visit, God may be close, but I had a powerful sense of other presences, perhaps the spirits of the pagan past were flitting in the shadows of the old trees. The early history of the abbey and its site is scant but it might cast a dim light on these competing impressions.
All of the original locations of the great twelfth-century monastic foundations in the Borders are to be found in the loops of rivers. Jedburgh Abbey rises above a sinuous bend in the Jed Water while Dryburgh, Kelso and Old Melrose are all bounded in part by loops in the course of the Tweed. Such a wide and deep river was a real barrier for millennia, until the bridge-building of the modern age, and it offered a degree of seclusion, a clear division between the temporal and the sacred worlds.
Early Christians were attracted to sites like these because they were impressed and inspired by a group of ascetics known as the Desert Fathers. Perhaps the best known in sixth- and seventh-century Western Europe was St Anthony of Egypt. Copies of his Life, written by St Athanasius of Alexandria, found their way to Britain and Ireland, and scholars believe that both Bede and the anonymous biographer of Cuthbert were able to consult this short but remarkable text. It relates how in the late third century Anthony was raised in a Christian household of some considerable means. When both his parents died, he seems to have had an epiphany. Giving away all of his inherited wealth, a farm of 300 acres and much else of value, he put his younger sister into a convent and embarked on a life of piety and asceticism. After many battles with the Devil and his legions of demons, he sought a solitary life, shutting himself up in a tomb at one point, starving himself and forcing himself into cycles of prayer and vigil. Although Athanasius nowhere states this explicitly, there is a sense threading through the narrative (and others) of the hermit using mortification of the flesh to induce a trance-like state so that he might have out-of-body experiences, something that may have seemed to detach his immortal soul from his worldly flesh. This appears to have been a continuing practice amongst these early saints.
Eventually, Anthony fled to the deserts beyond the fertile valley of the Nile to pursue a life of solitude that might draw him nearer to God. But his fame had spread and, according to Athanasius, ‘cells arose in the mountains, and the desert was colonised by monks who came forth from their own people . . . and he directed them like a father’. And then Anthony retreated even further, to a holy mountain, his ‘inner mountain’, where he lived out the rest of his harsh life. Surviving the persecutions of the Emperor Maximinus II in 311, he died some time later after giving instructions that his body was to be buried in secret so that it could not become a focus for reverence or pilgrimage, something else that would be clearly echoed at the end of Cuthbert’s own life.
The teachings and habits of the Desert Fathers inspired early Irish monks to seek places apart from the world, places of solitude with no worldly distractions. In a Gaelic rendering of deserta, they called their hermitages and communities dìseartan and it is a description that survives in the Scottish place-name of Dysart on the Fife coast, Dyzard in Cornwall, several Dyserths in Wales, and many Diserts in Ireland. Celtic monks let water, both salt and fresh, take the place of the sands of the Egyptian and Judaean deserts, and in the loops of the River Tweed at least two and perhaps four disearts were established in the sixth century as the spirit of Anthony reached across a continent.
Some time around 522, before Columba sailed to Iona in 563, an Irish monk called Modan came to Dryburgh, where he appears to have settled for a time. The son of an Irish sub-king, he has left shadowy traces of his journeys around Scotland. Ardchattan near Loch Etive was once Balmodhan, the settlement of Modan, Kilmodan on the Isle of Bute was his church, St Modan’s High School in Stirling remembers his presence in the Forth Valley, and his relics are said to have been enshrined at St Modan’s Church at Rosneath, across the Gare Loch from Helensburgh. In September 2015, local archaeologists rediscovered St Modan’s Well in the woods above Glendaruel in Argyll and found pebbles of bright quartz around it that had been left by pilgrims who had come to pray there and seek his blessing over many centuries before the Reformation.
At Dryburgh nothing remains of Modan’s presence except for the faint echo of a story. Having reluctantly taken up the office of abbot, he resigned and left the monastery so that he could be free to follow the life of a hermit over in the west of Scotland, near Dumbarton. Given that his relics found their way to Rosneath, it is reasonable to suppose that the Irishman died there. All of these references and locations suggest that the widely travelled monk was a real pre-Columban presence in the Borders, even though no material or documentary record of him can be found.
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