To the Island of Tides. Alistair Moffat
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on the damp, peaty earth I cannoned heavily into the little tree, hitting it with my chest. Unfortunately a hard plastic buckle on my rucksack was between me and the tree and I heard the unmistakable click of a rib snapping.
I knew that sound and what it felt like. Some years ago, when I had some money, I bought myself a splendid dapple-grey gelding. Standing almost seventeen hands, Sooty (daft name, I know, but he had black legs) could easily carry me and we enjoyed some memorable hacks in the countryside around our farm, and with a professional rider aboard he won the Novice Working Hunter class at the Ettrick and Yarrow Show. But one morning, in the arena next to the stables, I rode him without stirrups. Absolutely daft for such a poor rider. Instinctively I held on with my legs, squeezing him around the girth and, well schooled as he was, that sent him off into an abrupt canter and me flying out the side door. I fell hard and broke several ribs on my right-hand side. Exactly where the plastic buckle, me and the tree had collided. It hurt, but not so badly that I couldn’t make it to the top of the bank, and from there to the plateau of the river peninsula of Old Melrose. I wondered if repeated and inadvertent mortification of the flesh ranked alongside the self-inflicted torment practised by the monks who had crossed the ford and trodden the path to the diseart thirteen or more centuries before I made my undignified entrance.
Even more than the loop of the Tweed at Dryburgh, the river almost makes the peninsula an island at Old Melrose. Close to where I had scrambled up to the top of the bank, its course pinches tight, not quite joining, before it is pushed around 280 degrees by a massive river cliff gouged out by the glaciers of the last ice age. Near-vertical in places, it towers above the site of the monastery and adds to a powerful sense of enclosure. The topography of Old Melrose is surprising. Much of it is a high plateau that looks down on the river and affords a long southern vista to Monksford and Dryburgh; immediately below it is the fringe of a broad, grassy floodplain. Incongruously, there was a large canvas tipi pitched on it the day I arrived.
Now heavily wooded, the peninsula is part of a well-managed estate dominated by Old Melrose House. It stands on the highest point of the plateau, close to where the early medieval chapel of St Cuthbert was built, and around it are grass parks grazed by sheep and one or two horses. The buildings of the old dairy farm are bounded by woods and bright barley fields, early to ripen in this hot and sunny summer. Most of its byres are now converted into a tea room, a bookshop and an antiques shop. On the warm afternoon when I mortified one of my ribs, the discomfort was much eased by this beautiful, sylvan scene, a peaceful place that gave no hint of its ancient, austere existence.
4
Soul-Friends
Names tell stories, especially place-names, and sometimes they even move, taking their history with them. Old Melrose is so called because a New Melrose came into being, a consequence of dynastic politics. Scotland’s most modernising medieval king, a man who made a decisive break with the Celtic, Gaelic-speaking past, was David I. Raised at the court of the Norman-French Henry I, he was the sixth son of Malcolm III Canmore and his prospects of succeeding to the throne of Scotland were unlikely. But he had talent, and fortune fell out happily for him. Fluent in French, schooled in Western European culture and steeped in the dynamics of politics, he was, as contemporary writers consistently assert, a most perfect knight. He was also devout and interested in the new, reformed orders of monks who were becoming influential in France. When he became an earl with wide lands in Southern Scotland, he invited communities of these men to found monasteries in the Tweed Valley.
In 1124 Alexander I died without an heir and his younger brother, Earl David, succeeded. Anxious to strengthen the bounds of his new kingdom and to retain control of the Church, a key engine of royal government, the king had a problem with Old Melrose. With the cult of Cuthbert securely anchored in England at Durham, where the spectacular new cathedral had risen on the river peninsula of the Wear, many of the sites associated with the saint were claimed by the prince-bishops, including Old Melrose. But David wanted to re-found the monastery there and he had invited a group from the order of Cistercians to come to the Tweed Valley. To appease Durham, he exchanged St Mary’s Church in Berwick-upon-Tweed for the ancient site – and immediately ran into another problem. For reasons now lost, Abbot Richard and his Cistercians refused to build on the river peninsula, even though it was the holiest and most famous church in the Borders, a place where saints had walked and worshipped. They preferred to found their new monastery at a place called Little Fordell, two and a half miles to the west, beyond the ruins of the Roman depot at Trimontium, on the southern bank of the Tweed. But probably at King David’s insistence, they kept the name of Melrose.
Folk toponymy associates it with the mels or the mallets used by masons to build the abbey and the Rose Window at the east end of the church. But in fact it is a synthesis of two Gaelic words. Rhos, or Ross in the anglicised spelling, means ‘a promontory’ and describes the old river peninsula, but maol is more obscure. It can mean ‘bare’ and many believe that the definition ends there. ‘Bare promontory’ was how Old Melrose looked in the seventh and eighth centuries, long before the mighty trees of the nineteenth-century estate were planted. But, in fact, that is a misreading, and the reality is more interesting. Maol can also mean ‘bald’, and the old Druidic tonsure cut across the crown of the head made Celtic monks look bald. And from that, it acquired a further meaning that can be detected in the Christian name of Malcolm. It comes from Maol Choluim and means ‘a follower of St Columba of Iona’. And so in Gaelic, maol became a term for a monk, ‘a bald man’, and so Melrose was ‘the promontory of the monks’.
Cuthbert and his servant arrived at the monastery with a great deal more dignity than I had managed, but I believe he entered it at approximately the same place. Hidden in woodland to the east of an old track that was once a drove road in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries lies all that remains of the fabric of Old Melrose. Across the narrow neck of the peninsula, the monastic vallum was dug and its shallow ditches on either side of a central bank can still be made out amongst the lush green ferns and the willowherb. Much deeper when Cuthbert first saw it and almost certainly topped by a wooden palisade rammed into the compacted earth of the upcast, it marked a boundary between worlds. To the west lay the world the young man was leaving – the fields, farms and woods where men and women toiled, where warbands rode and killed, and where devils lurked in the dark places. Beyond the vallum was a place of light where the peace of God bathed the land, where the air was daily purified by the power of prayer and where holy men walked. Old Melrose was a portal, a place where monks strove through privation and contemplation to know the mind of God, where they looked with longing to the sky, hoping to approach Him and His angelic hosts more closely.
When I came at last to the vallum, I saw that it was crossed in two places and guessed that where I stood, the point at which the modern, tarmac road runs up to Old Melrose House, was the original gate, what Cuthbert would have understood as the first door to paradise. It lies closer to the track from Monksford. Here is Bede’s account of what took place when Cuthbert and his servant arrived:
Now Boisil himself, who was standing at the gates of the monastery, saw him first; and foreseeing in spirit how great the man whom he saw was going to be in his manner of life, he uttered this one sentence to those standing by: ‘Behold the servant of the Lord!’ thereby imitating Him who, looking upon Nathaniel as he came towards Him, said: ‘Behold an Israelite indeed in whom there is no guile’. Thus is wont to testify that pious and veteran servant and priest of God, Sigfrith, who was standing with others near Boisil himself when he said these words . . . Without saying more, Boisil forthwith kindly received Cuthbert on his arrival, and when the latter had explained the reason of his journey, namely that he preferred the monastery to the world, Boisil still more kindly kept him. For he was Prior of that same monastery. And after a few days, when Eata of blessed memory arrived, who was then a priest and the abbot of the monastery and afterwards both abbot and bishop of the church at Lindisfarne, Boisil told him about Cuthbert, declaring that his mind was well disposed, and obtained permission from him for Cuthbert to receive the tonsure and to join the fellowship of the brethren.
Much moved to find myself standing almost certainly in the same place where this momentous exchange took place, I sat down by the wrought-iron railings of a grass park to re-read Bede’s account of the meeting at the