To the Island of Tides. Alistair Moffat
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Navron House, the central location, and then, six pages in, the story begins with the reader transported almost trance-like back to the past. It is magical and masterly.
What my critical correspondent from Berwick was suggesting, if that is not too mild a verb, was that a deeper understanding of place would enhance the dry recital of dates and events that form the framework of a historical narrative. And more, it would make a powerful link between the present and even the deep past. Fernand Braudel, the great French historian, wrote of the longue durée, the notion that peoples in similar geographical, social and economic circumstances maintain habits of life and mind over vast reaches of time. If a sense of a place, its atmosphere as much as its topography and climate, could be caught and understood, then history would come alive.
About twelve years ago I was making a TV series on the history of Tyneside, a part of the world I am very fond of, and we were filming at Durham Cathedral. Setting up to shoot a sequence around the shrine of St Cuthbert, we were joined by the stern lady who ran the administration of the great church. I imagine she was checking that we were behaving ourselves. When she pronounced Cuthbert the greatest English saint, I felt compelled to point out that he had been born and raised in what is now Scotland. Before I could add that the border did not exist in the seventh century, she exclaimed, ‘Nonsense! Utter nonsense,’ and stormed off back down the nave. We packed up our gear, eventually completed the series and I moved on to another project. But I never forgot that exchange. Thirteen centuries after his death, Cuthbert’s exemplary life still attracted fierce loyalty, even passion, to say nothing of contested history. One day I would find the time to write about him.
In 2017, that day came when I began to think seriously about this book. I am no Christian, but sainthood and how it was and is achieved interests me very much. Heroes and heroic actions I can understand and admire, but the journey from ordinary life to an elevated, demi-godlike state is something I wanted to know more about. Cuthbert lived from approximately 635 to 687, a time of seismic cultural shifts in Britain, the period often known as the Dark Ages because of the dearth of extant written record. As Anglo-Saxon invaders became settlers who supplanted and submerged Celtic society over much of lowland Britain, languages were exchanged and enduring identities forged. It was a time of great, largely unreported turmoil.
Cuthbert is an Anglian name and he may have been born into the first or second generation of a landed family who settled in the Tweed Valley. I knew that around 651 he entered the monastery at Old Melrose, where he took holy orders. After some years there, he travelled east to the Holy Island of Lindisfarne, became prior of the monastery and eventually bishop before dying in his hermitage on the little island of Inner Farne. I thought that if I could understand something of his journey through life and, as importantly, through the landscape, then I might be able to move close to a sense of the man who walked with God.
I wanted to go to Lindisfarne, a deeply atmospheric place I have come to love, having visited it half a dozen times over the years. Now, its peace and spirituality seem even more to be valued, as political chaos swirls around us, as we blunder through the wilderness of a divisive and bitter world that seems at times to be irretrievably broken. And so I decided on what would become two journeys.
To be closer to Cuthbert, I wanted to walk where he walked and spend time in the places where he passed his life. I would begin at Old Melrose and travel down the banks of the Tweed to its confluence with the River Till before following Cuthbert inland to the moors of northern Northumberland. Once over the Kyloe Hills, I would find the coast and cross the causeway to Lindisfarne to complete what might be called a secular pilgrimage.
I also wanted to make the journey for myself. While walking in the shadow of Cuthbert and trying to understand his faith and the extreme lengths he went to in pursuit of piety and purity of thought and deed, I would also think about my own life. The contrast between his asceticism and beliefs and my lack of either could not have been more stark, but I hoped very much that I might learn something from Cuthbert.
And, dear Reader, I am sad not to be able to point out to you that no paragraph in this introduction begins with an ablative absolute, although I do recall that you also disliked sentences that begin with conjunctions.
Preface
A Short History of Lindisfarne
Having rattled through the featureless flatlands of the Fens and past the remains of the old industrial heartlands of South Yorkshire, travellers on the London train bound for Edinburgh pass a place of great majesty. As the carriages slow and glide through the small station, many look up from their newspapers or phones to gaze at Durham Cathedral. The mass of its towers and great nave perch on a river peninsula above the Wear and they speak of faith, of continuity, of solidity and of half-remembered history.
The interior of the cathedral is as awe-inspiring as the exterior. Immense pillars carry the soaring roof and lead the eye down to the high altar where the glorious stained glass of the rose window glows above it. Behind all of that splendour is what made it possible. On the floor is a slab of rust-coloured marble with the name ‘Cuthbertus’ inscribed on it. Durham Cathedral was raised on Cuthbert’s bones. Such was the power of his cult and the love believers felt for this gentle, vulnerable, deeply devout man that the towers of the great church soared to the heavens to celebrate his life, his miracles and his ability to inspire a simple and profound faith.
Beyond Newcastle, the train edges ever closer to the North Sea coast, as the lovely village of Alnmouth comes into view. Not far south of Berwick-upon-Tweed, a low, sandy island can be seen, its farthest point punctuated by a steep rock topped by a fairytale castle. Nearby a small cluster of rooftops huddle around the ruins of a church.
Lindisfarne’s beauty is quieter, less dramatic than Durham’s but its innate spiritual power is immeasurably greater. Saints walked on the island, miracles were seen, and between 685 and 687 Cuthbert was its bishop, master of a vast patrimony of land and glittering wealth. The sandy island was the centre of early Christianity in seventh-century England, a place where great faith was forged in the fires of privation, prayer and personal sacrifice.
Place-names can be emblematic, compressed nuggets of forgotten history, and the mouth-filling sensuousness of Lindisfarne may have a tale to tell. It seems that the Romans knew it as Insula Medicata, and that may have referred to an island where plants grew that were useful for making balms, poultices or decoctions. Dialects of Old Welsh were spoken down the length of Britain before and after the Roman province of Britannia, and the native name of Ynys Medcaut derived directly from the Latin name.
Throughout the fifth and sixth centuries Angles and Saxons sailed the North Sea from Scandinavia and what is now Germany and Holland to settle on the eastern shores of Britain. The kings of Lindsey ruled over the low-lying lands south of the Humber and their people knew themselves as the Lindisfaras. A band of them appears to have colonised Ynys Medcaut, perhaps building a defensive stockade on the rock where the castle now stands.
When Gaelic-speaking monks came to the island in the seventh century, they may have brought the second element of the island’s name. Fearann means ‘a piece of land’, and Lindis-fearann was coined: the land of the Lindisfaras.
Led by Aidan, twelve monks came from Columba’s famous monastery on Iona at the invitation of the Northumbrian King Oswald. As a young man he had been exiled and sought sanctuary on Iona, where he was baptised. Having won a decisive victory over a coalition of native British kings at Heavenfield, near Hadrian’s Wall, Oswald established his capital place on the sea-mark rock at Bamburgh. And so that support and resources were readily available to the new community, Aidan decided to build the first church and its monastic cells close by, on Lindisfarne.
With King Oswald translating his Gaelic for the pagan Anglian settlers, Aidan began the process of conversion. At Old Melrose on the River Tweed, then part of Northumbria, he founded another monastery. In 651 Cuthbert entered holy orders there and his long journey to Lindisfarne and sainthood form the core of the narrative that follows.
The Church in Britain was riven with controversy and in 663 Oswald’s brother, Oswy, convened a synod at Whitby to settle all arguments. Roman practices were preferred over the customs of the Celtic Church and Bishop