To the Island of Tides. Alistair Moffat
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the cross by the road and made his way with his servant downhill to Dryburgh, he may have known the story of Modan, but the fact that he moved on to Old Melrose probably means that the early foundation had not survived the saint’s departure.
But I think that Modan’s spirit still flits around the ruined transept, the presbytery beyond it, the cloister and the tumbled walls of the twelfth-century abbey. It was probably built on that site because he had chosen it, dedicated it to God, made it sacred with prayer, and the stories lingered as the centuries passed. And more than that, I believe that like many Irish monks Modan made a link with the pagan past. He will certainly have worn the Druidic tonsure. Monks influenced by the doctrines of the Church of Rome had their hair cut from the crowns of their heads, leaving a fringe around the temples and at the back. This was done in imitation of Christ’s crown of thorns. By contrast, Irish monks and many in Scotland were tonsured across the crowns of their heads, from ear to ear, giving them very high foreheads. Scholars believe that the pagan priests of the first millennium BC, the Druids encountered by the Roman invaders, wore their hair in the same way, their foreheads probably marked by tattoos.
On their missions of conversion of the sixth and seventh centuries, Christian priests and monks were mindful of the advice of Pope Gregory the Great. In the 590s, he ordained that instead of destroying pagan sites and temples ‘they should be sprinkled with holy water’ and used as places of Christian worship. The pagan festivals of Imbolc, Beltane, Lughnasa and Samhuinn should be celebrated not in veneration of idols but for the sake of ‘good fellowship’. This pragmatic approach recognised that for many conversion was not a blinding light, an epiphany or a moment when the whole world changed, but a process whereby beliefs held over millennia gradually shifted. And it was sensible to worship a Christian god at places that were already sacred. They retained their sense of spirituality and also people knew where they were.
For these reasons, I believe that many sites whose history appears to have started only with the coming of missionaries were in fact sacred long before they arrived and that their original sanctity only withered slowly. Like St Anthony, Modan will have been an ascetic, practising mortification of the flesh in many ways. And in itself, I think that this too was a vital link with the beliefs of those who climbed Eildon Hill North four times a year to light fires and celebrate the turning points of the farming year. Unlike the modern Christian God of love and forgiveness, the pantheon of deities who governed the lives and fates of the peoples of Celtic Britain and Ireland, and also those Angles, Saxons and others who sailed the North Sea in search of land, needed to be propitiated. That is, the malignant, aggressive nature of some of these pagan gods had to be neutralised by acts of sacrifice, and often blood needed to be shed. The discovery of what are known as the bog bodies, prehistoric corpses sufficiently well preserved to show the marks of ritual killing, shows that human sacrifices were sometimes required if the pagan gods were to be persuaded not to send thunder, wind and rain to wreck the harvest, or a pestilence to visit the land. Fear was as powerful as faith.
The notion of human sacrifice was not confined to pagan cultures. The early Christian God of the Old Testament asked Abraham to sacrifice Isaac before relenting, but he could also be vengeful, and for many centuries the awful prospect of the fires and pits of Hell, or eternal torment, was very real indeed for most believers. It seems to me that the ascetic monks and hermits were also practising a version of propitiation, a way of pleasing and appeasing God, committing painful acts not only in pursuit of personal purity, piety and the transcendence of the flesh but also undertaken on behalf of communities. For that latter reason, saints were readily venerated, thanked and seen as figures who floated in a sphere between the mortal and the divine and who could intercede with God on behalf of many people. It is thought that the wide proliferation of early saints (each village in Cornwall seems to have its own) was a gradual substitution for local gods.
Like many of his contemporaries, Modan will have embodied much of this continuity and I think he was drawn to Dryburgh because it was already a holy place for the pre-Christian communities who lived along the banks of the Tweed. And that history has not entirely fled. It can be sensed, buried deep on the site of the twelfth-century abbey, where enough of the fabric survives to allow a good reconstruction of monastic life: the bells ringing the canonical hours at dead of night, the chant of the psalms, readings in the chapter house, the whispering as monks gossiped behind their hands, and all the bustle of a busy community going about the business of worship, management and food production. But under the daily din, the silences as the monks shuffled down the night stair to the church for lauds and other intervals of peace, another river runs, one whose course can only be intuited.
I am certain that Walter Scott knew and felt that Dryburgh was different. Of course with his love of romance, he will have felt at home in the old medieval abbey, its scheming abbots, priors, cellarers and novices gossiping, taking part in medieval politics, celebrating the drama of the Latin mass in the presbytery. But in his life Scott was aware, I think, of a strangeness in his own nature, a sensitivity to another world beyond history. In Ivanhoe and others in his vast canon of historical novels, Scott showed a powerful longing for the past that sometimes glows with roseate nostalgia but also connects with the ethereal, the uncatchable, something fluttering on the edge of his imagination. And few novelists have ever captured a pungent sense of place in the long past so well – but sometimes not completely. There is often something of the unexplained in Scott’s stories. Perhaps that was the deeper reason why he chose to be buried at Dryburgh, not just because it is beautiful but because its roots in the long past reached far down into the earth of the river peninsula and were unknowable. Scott knew that ghosts flitted amongst the ruins.
Next to Scott’s solid granite sarcophagus stands the small, simple headstone of a soldier: Douglas Haig, Field Marshal Earl Haig. He wanted the same memorial that was set up to those hundreds of thousands of soldiers who died under his command in Flanders and he is buried at Dryburgh simply because it is close to Bemersyde. As I stood by these two graves in the north transept, it struck me that there was not an obvious and extreme contrast but a clear connection between the unwilling architect of great slaughter on the Western Front and the man whose stories went a long way to inventing the Scotland that many regiments believed they were fighting to protect.
I spent less time at Dryburgh than I expected, perhaps because I was anxious to catch up with Cuthbert and be on my way. In the wooden hut that serves as a ticket office and small shop, I bought a packet of fudge to keep me going on my journey to Old Melrose. I would need it.
* * *
The road from Dryburgh turns sharply downhill to the flood plain of the Tweed and past some trim new houses built not from bricks or breezeblock but a good deal of cut stone. I passed some beautifully squared blocks of red and yellow sandstone sitting on pallets by the roadside. The starkness of these new builds will weather down well as the sandstone mellows with the years and their gardens grow up. I noted high walls and an electric gate around one house and supposed that rural crime penetrates everywhere, even down this half-hidden old road. I passed a footbridge over the Tweed but ignored it. A mile further north was Monksford and I planned a baptism of sorts, to wade across just as Cuthbert and his servant would have done, leading his horse behind them. After the driest summer for forty years, the river should be low.
At the foot of the road, on a small mound that looked artificial to me, stood another imposition from the eccentric Earl of Buchan. His fascination with Greek mythology drew David Erskine into episodes of laughable daftness. Apparently he once held a soiree where he dressed up as Apollo on Mount Parnassus with nine young ladies dancing around him as his muses. Goodness knows what they made of it. On this mound in front of me, at the beginning of a long, straight stretch known as the Monks’ Road, he had masons build a small, circular, pillared structure he called the Temple of the Muses, and in the centre a statue of Apollo was installed. It has mercifully gone now and been replaced by a modern bronze by Siobhan O’Hehir of four naked women facing in four compass directions to represent the seasons. They look well, their poses not frozen but somehow sinuous and liquid. By contrast, I am certain that the original statue of Apollo would have borne a distinct resemblance to the cavorting earl. Littering the landscape in this way, plonking inappropriate objects in it for his own aggrandisement and amusement, is more than irritating. Just because they are relatively old, it should not automatically mean that this ridiculous temple and