To the Island of Tides. Alistair Moffat
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future, I have found myself dwelling not so much on good memories as on the darknesses, all that went wrong, bad mistakes I made, people I hurt, people who wronged me or ignored me. In the half-light of early morning, drifting in and out of sleep, the ghosts of disappointments, mistakes, slights and regrets flit through my mind too often and I fear I am becoming more and more bitter rather than wise, accepting and forgiving, clinging to the hurts of the past rather than savouring the everyday joys of the present. What I need to find is some peace of mind and it occurred to me that if I took myself to Lindisfarne for a time, I might find some in that place of spirits. After all, the old name Ynys Medcaut, from Insula Medicata, means ‘the isle of healing’.
Buried for more than a century on the island, and once its bishop, Cuthbert was the great saint of the north. Durham Cathedral and the vice-regal powers of the medieval prince-bishops are his direct legacy and his tomb is still much venerated. But I believe that his spirit has never left Lindisfarne. As Cuthbert and his ascetic companions watched the sun rise over the grey chill of the North Sea and listened to the bleak music of the winds and the waves, they knew that all of the elements of the world were writ large before them. Somewhere in the huge skies above the island, God was moving and they prayed that somehow His spirit would descend and be revealed in this place that stood apart from the world.
Probably born and raised as the younger son of Anglian lords in the hills of Lauderdale in the Scottish Borders, Cuthbert came to the monastery at Old Melrose some time around 650 or 651. While tending sheep one starry night, the boy had looked out to the east and seen a vision, believed to be the ascent of the soul of St Aidan from his church on Lindisfarne. Much moved by this, Cuthbert rode to meet the monks in the loop of the River Tweed at Old Melrose and asked to take holy orders. When Prior Boisil died a few years afterwards, the shepherd boy succeeded him. And then, perhaps in 676, he laid down the cares of office and began life as a wandering hermit, seeking to move closer to God. Two caves near the Northumberland coast are associated with his exemplary life.
But by Christmas 686, Cuthbert knew that he was beginning to die and, having been reluctantly appointed Bishop of Lindisfarne two years before, he put down his cope, pectoral cross and staff to return to the purity and peace of his solitary life in the cold hermitage on Inner Farne. A short time later, he died.
As I have said, I am no Christian, and nor does mortification of the flesh hold many attractions, but I would like to seek something of the peace Cuthbert sought at the end of his life. My DNA ancestry is Northumbrian, as his must have been, and my people sailed the North Sea in the fifth and sixth centuries from Denmark and southern Sweden to settle on the eastern coasts and in the river valleys of Britain just as his people did. I was born and raised only a short distance from the hills where he tended sheep. I know that thirteen centuries separate us, but perhaps I could walk the holy ground of Lindisfarne in Cuthbert’s footsteps; perhaps some of the eternal spirits of that magical place would speak to me.
I began to plan a secular pilgrimage, to walk from the ancient monastery at Old Melrose to what I had come to think of as the Island of Tides, and on my way I would visit places where Cuthbert prayed, preached and wrought miracles. As well as trying to understand something of the harsh lives of these leathery old saints and their efforts to know the mind of God, I knew during this journey of endings and beginnings I would also come across some glorious, life-enhancing colour – from the disciplined joy of the Lindisfarne Gospels, the glittering culture of the kingdom of Northumbria, the scholarship of Bede of Jarrow, as well as the story of Cuthbert, one of the first and perhaps the greatest saint of Britain. And maybe I would discover on the Island of Tides that the tides in the lives of men are not so very different.
2
The Hill of Faith
It was a day of high summer. A cloudless July sky, perfectly still, without even a breath of a breeze riffling the topmost leaves of the old sycamores on the ridge above the track. In the Tile Field, about half a mile below our farmhouse, all the sheep and cattle were lying down and the only animals I could see moving were the four horses who graze the field beyond them. They are at a DIY livery at the neighbouring farm and each morning one or two women come with bowls of hard feed and a barrow to pick up their muck. It was so quiet I could hear them talking. It is astonishing how sound carries across our little valley, and this morning I could clearly hear the bleat of sheep in the fields above Brownmoor, as well as the distant purr of a quad bike as the shepherd went up onto the southern ridge to check on the flock about a mile to the south.
As Maidie, my West Highland terrier puppy, and I walked along the track by the old wood, the women must have been three-quarters of a mile away. Not far enough for Maidie. A very territorial terrier, she had stopped when the horsewomen began to speak, pricked her ears and barked loudly at them. How dare they! Who are they? This set off the collies up at Brownmoor, and then moments later, across the stillness of the morning, I heard the big, booming bark of Chiquita at Burn Cottage down at the bottom of the Long Track that leads to our farm. She is a huge Newfoundland. Doggy stereo rang round the hills. But it soon calmed down and we walked on through the waking landscape, stopping and staring at all our familiar glories.
We live on a small farm in the Scottish Borders. At least I think we do. I have never been sure what to call the little bit of the planet we own and look after. At eighty acres, it is bigger than a smallholding or a croft; I would wince if anyone called it an estate, but it seems too small to be a farm. We do not grow any crops except grass, and my wife manages about twenty-five acres of pasture to breed horses. So, I guess ‘small farm’ is the least inaccurate description. Below the house we have gradually built up a stable block that now has ten loose boxes, a hay barn and a tack room, and by the track that leads down to the lane and from there to the main road we have added more outbuildings, an arena and barns. One of these is my office, a large room overflowing with books and runs of periodicals that have helped me write mainly Scottish history over the last twenty-five years.
Perhaps one of my most eccentric possessions is a series of annual volumes published by the Berwickshire Naturalists’ Club. Founded in 1831 by Dr George Johnston of Berwick-upon-Tweed, it is the oldest active natural history field club in Britain and its object (what would now be called a mission statement) is pleasingly limited. Members are interested in ‘investigating the natural history of Berwickshire and its vicinage’, while the club badge carries the figure of a wood sorrel, Johnston’s favourite flower, and the motto is Mare et Tellus et quod Omnia, Coelum – ‘The Sea and the Land and what covers all, the Heavens’. Wonderful. Especially the use of the obscure ‘vicinage’ instead of vicinity.
From the BNC, I discovered that in the summer of 1930 a group of members had visited what they reckoned to be the ancient village of Wrangham between Kelso and St Boswells. Their guide, Rev. W.L. Sime, pointed to a row of ancient ash trees at Brotherstone Farm, saying that it grew where the village once stood. Andrew Armstrong’s map of the Borders made in 1771 also plotted its remains at the farm. This immediately caught my interest because I had been reading the Anonymous Life of St Cuthbert in the excellent translation by Bertram Colgrave, a scholar at the University of Durham. There are three eighth-century versions of lives of Cuthbert, two written by that more venerable and very great scholar Bede of Jarrow, but the earliest is the anonymous text almost certainly written by a monk on Lindisfarne between 699 and 705, only twelve or at most eighteen years after Cuthbert died.
The first Life is also more richly detailed than the others and contains what sounds like testimony from monks who knew Cuthbert. The account of his miracles and deeds feels at once more personal, more authentic, less formulaic, less political. It seems that Cuthbert was of Anglian rather than native Celtic descent (his name itself suggests that); the son of a landed, perhaps noble family, for the young boy was sent to be fostered, a common practice in early medieval Britain and Ireland and a means of extending bonds of loyalty and obligation amongst ruling elites. The prime purpose of both Bede’s and the Anonymous Life was to establish Cuthbert’s cult of sainthood and recount the miracles he wrought with God’s help. Here is a passage from the earlier Life that also imparts a little biographical detail:
At the same time the holy man of God was invited by a certain woman called Kenswith, who is still alive, a nun and a widow who had brought