To the Island of Tides

by Alistair Moffat

  Originally, guising at Hallowe’en did not involve outlandish dressing-up but a simple daubing of ash from the great bonfires that blazed in the darkness to effect a symbolic disguise, the cue for all sorts of licence between men and women. It persisted for millennia and in the 1796 Statistical Account for Scotland, kirk ministers in several parishes were complaining about ‘A sort of secret society of Guisers made itself notorious in several of the neighbouring villages, men dressed as women, women dressed as men, dancing in a very unseemly way.’

  There is persuasive evidence that belief in late prehistoric society attached great significance to the human head, perhaps as the repository of essence, of what might have been seen as the soul. Roman historians reported that European Celts were fond of collecting the heads of their enemies as grisly trophies, sometimes attaching them by the hair to their saddles, even preserving them in cedar oil. In Scotland, skulls have been found at several sites and their arrangement suggests that they were displayed in some way. As late as AD 70, the priests of Venutius, the native king of the Brigantes, a federation of Celtic kindreds on either side of the Pennines, set up a row of skulls to defend a rampart against the assault of Roman legions. This has been described as a ghost fence.

  These ancient beliefs still sound a distant echo at Hallowe’en. When hollowed-out turnip or pumpkin lanterns have a candle placed inside and are set on a windowsill, it looks very much like a relic of paganism; a ghost fence still flickering in the early dark of winter.

  At Imbolc in February, fires blazed once more inside the precinct on Eildon Hill North. The festival has been Christianised as St Bridget’s Day and it was the moment of first fruits, when ewes began to lactate in anticipation of lambing. In early May, Beltane signalled the beginning of the time-worn journey of transhumance, when flocks and herds were moved up the hill trails to summer grazing. This was celebrated in Scotland as late as the early nineteenth century with ritual meals washed down with a liberal amount of alcohol. Not surprisingly, the kirk wagged its finger at what ministers knew to be a relict of paganism. The final nodal point came around in August. Lughnasa is now pronounced as ‘Lammas’ and a famous fair is held in St Andrews. This was the time grass-fattened beasts were bartered for slaughter or breeding, and the clustering of agricultural shows at that time in the calendar remembers the pivotal importance of the old Celtic feast.

  All of these turning points revolved around the behaviour and needs of domesticated flocks and herds and the rhythms of a stock-rearing society. Weather mattered to our ancestors even more than it does for modern farmers. Three thousand years ago there were no large byres to overwinter cattle, there was little or no shelter from the winter’s blast other than the folds of the land or the leafless trees of the wildwood. Severe snow, ice and cold, wind-driven rain saw many animals die and a parched summer could mean that they did not put on condition. To judge their prospects, farmers looked to the sky, and it seems that by the first millennium BC it was also where they looked for the gods that would help them rear their beasts and bring home their harvests safely.

  Priest-kings climbed Eildon Hill North on the Celtic feast days to be nearer to their pantheon and to be seen by the divine beings who in some way controlled what happened on the Earth, who sent good and bad fortune, who sent snow, wind, rain or sun. They were sky gods, and the great enclosure on Eildon Hill North was not a fortress but a sky temple.

  The Brothers’ Stones do not stand on the highest part of their hill. To the west, there is a rocky outcrop, which hid the second stone as I approached up the farm track, and I sat down there to look at and think about the relationship of the great temple and the stones, if there was one. And how all of this might have been understood by Cuthbert.

  The stones were probably dragged up Brotherstone Hill a long time before the ditches were dug on Eildon Hill North, perhaps a thousand or even two thousand years before. But I cannot think that this concentration of monuments was an accident. Perhaps the link was simple – the sky. Thunder, lightning and the drama of the weather have long been associated with the gods and their moods, and on Brotherstone Hill there is no better place to watch it change or settle, not even from the sky temple. Eildon Hill North does not have all-round panoramic views. Instead its longest vistas stretch to the east, to the twin stones and the Cow Stone at the foot of the slope. They felt and looked to me like a gateway, the doors of some sort of lost perception. I am very sceptical about all of the musings of those who follow ley-lines and other invisible trigonometry in the landscape, and I know I am straying perilous close, but there did seem to be some sort of alignment between the summit of Eildon Hill North, the Brothers’ Stones and the Cow Stone.

  Cuthbert cannot have been insensitive to the ghosts of the pagan past that swirled around the hill where he tended sheep. Both the Anonymous Life and Bede’s speak of his missions of conversion, his attempts to defeat pagan belief in the Borders, in the hills around Melrose, persuading country people to turn away from amulets and incantations and back to the love of Christ. And yet the stones may still have been venerated in some way. Perhaps the young shepherd saw Brotherstone Hill as a Christian sky temple, a spiritual vantage point over the valley of the great river, the place where he could clearly see angels descend and ascend with the glowing orb of fire that was Aidan’s soul. What modern eyes might have seen as an eclipse, a rare Blood Moon, where the sun turns its milky white surface to red, might have seemed like a vision to Cuthbert, metaphor rather than reality, the Earth and the celestial phenomena around it as themselves divine.

  Turning over these half-formed notions about the sacred earth, the hallowed ground, a place where saints had walked, I sat for a long time by the old stones, watching cloud shadows chase across the sunlit fields before disappearing into the folds of the hills. Even though the account of Cuthbert’s vision is infused with biblical tropes, from Jacob’s dream of the stairway to heaven at Bethel in the Old Testament to the shepherds tending their flocks at night on the eve of the Nativity in the New, I was thinking about something beyond the scriptural. Below me, on the lower slopes of the hill, a flock of newly shorn ewes were bent over the sweet grass of fresh pasture, the lambs almost as big as their mothers. Thirteen centuries since the boy woke his fellow shepherds to tell them what he had seen in the sky, sheep were still grazing on Brotherstone Hill. And the skies above were still immense and dramatic.

  When I ask myself a pressing question, more and more pressing on the threshold of my eighth decade, about what I believe, the provisional answer has nothing to do with the divine, a Christian god or any other, or indeed any conventional hope of an afterlife. I believe in an immortality of a different sort: the immortality of continuity, especially continuity in the same place. I will live on through the lives and memories of my children and their children. Even though that will fade in time, perhaps in only three generations, there will be a pile of dusty books somewhere with their forewards, dedications, blurbs and contents where some sense of my life and what I thought can be assembled. If anyone is interested.

  With Cuthbert, even though there is no certain way to know his ancestral DNA, I feel that because mine is also Anglian, we have a direct connection. And on that warm and sunny day on the hill, I felt I could hear him on the edge of the wind, murmuring his prayers, looking up at what I was looking at, searching the sky for angels. But he could not have known that he was gazing upon a large part of what would become known as St Cuthbert’s Land, a place where dozens of churches would be dedicated to him and where, for 1,000 years, documents would carry the phrase ‘for St Cuthbert and for God’. And I did not know until that moment my journey had actually begun. I hoped the shepherd boy would lead me down the hill and that I could walk with his shadow to the monastery at Old Melrose.

  3

  In the Sacred Land

  It had been a parched summer, the hottest and longest for more than forty years, with the sun beating down almost every day since the beginning of May. After a six-month wi
nter, with the last snowfall in early April, the landscape was flooded with welcome light and warmth.

  Temperatures climbed steadily and reached ninety degrees Fahrenheit in the last week of July. For weeks on end we sweltered in the high seventies and eighties, and virtually no rain fell. But then one evening the heat suddenly became very oppressive, and over the dark heads of the southern hills gunmetal-grey clouds quickly gathered. Far in the distance, thunder rumbled. By 9 p.m. it had grown very dark, and after a few spots it began to rain torrentially. While we ran around the farmhouse closing windows, there was a tremendous crack of thunder directly overhead that made us all flinch instinctively and sheet lightning lit the black sky.

  An overnight downpour began, the raindrops huge, and it had a dramatic effect around the farmhouse, especially on the track. In towns and cities, heavy rain falls on hard surfaces – roofs, tarmac and pavements – and is usually taken away by efficient drainage. When it stops, and especially if the sun shines afterwards, it is as though it has never fallen. Here, heavy rain leaves its mark for many days. Much of the rammed earth and pebbles, compacted by vehicle wheels, hooves and feet, was washed away, exposing the stones of the old track, like Roman cobbles. It was worst down at the house, where the velocity of the flow was strongest. I could see that the downpour of the previous night had created a miniature water world, a network of tiny river channels, oxbows, deltas, lakes and dams, something that would delight a child. The bottom track is about a 15% gradient and 120 yards long, and so when the little rivers of rain reached the bend around the gable end of the old house, they had considerable force and carried a lot of pebbles and silt with them. As the camber forced the rainwater to turn, it cut out little river cliffs two or three inches high, as the fine silt piled up. It was like speeded-up land formation, millions of years of geology recreated by one night of torrential rain.

  By the time I took the dogs out at 6.30 a.m., the sky had cleared and a watery sun blinked above the woods out to the east. As often after summer rain, the scents of the land were released: the musky smell of wet earth, the bitterness of leaves battered off twigs and branches by the huge raindrops, and the puddles on the tracks filled with the metallic whiff of silt and grit, which was dust only twelve hours before. More, less dramatic, rain was forecast for later in the day, but I decided to risk getting wet and to make a sustained start on the first few steps of my pilgrimage, my journey in Cuthbert’s long shadow. His vision on Brotherstone Hill had deepened the young man’s piety and ultimately persuaded him to go to Old Melrose to seek admission to the community, to become a novice monk.

  Since I wanted to walk where he had walked, see something of what he had seen, I needed to work out the route of Cuthbert’s journey from Wrangham to the monastery, what were probably the most fateful, life-changing steps he was ever to take. Always as a historian I have tried to imagine how people thought at the time and what prompted them to act as they did in the past, avoiding the attachment of modern motives and attitudes, thereby not falling into the trap of reading history backwards. Neither Robert Bruce nor Edward II of England knew how events at Bannockburn would fall out and the fact that we do should not colour the telling of the story of the battle. Nothing was inevitable.

  So it was with all of the actors in our history. As he made his way between the hedges and looked out over the river valleys of his childhood, Cuthbert did not know where his decision to become a monk would take him, or indeed that the monastery would even admit him. Bede recounts something surprising. Instead of walking, showing some humility in imitation of Christ and the Apostles, Cuthbert rode high on his horse, carrying a spear, and with a servant walking beside him. This detail certainly marks him out as an aristocrat of some degree, but it is difficult to believe that he was armed on account of the countryside between Wrangham and Old Melrose being hostile, these fields and lanes he must have known so well. It seems much more likely he was showing off his status. Lack of self-confidence and uncertainty might have prompted him to think on all manner of possibilities: that his journey was a final taste of freedom, the last time he would look over the fields as a free man before he gave his life to God. And I am sure he wondered how strong his commitment was. Perhaps floating at the back of his mind was the possibility of rejection – either a change of mind on his part or a refusal of the monks to admit him.

  This is a pivotal moment in Cuthbert’s story and it is worth quoting the relevant passage at length from Bede’s Life. His characteristically precise and crisp monastic Latin makes a difficult journey sound rather too smooth and inevitable, but Bede’s business was more than historical. He wanted to establish the cult of St Cuthbert and no doubts or blemishes could be admitted in the story of the holy man’s exemplary life. Bede was not so much reading history backwards as making sure it travelled in a straight line and in the right direction:

  Meanwhile the reverend servant of the Lord, having forsaken the things of the world, hastens to submit to monastic discipline, since he had been urged by the heavenly vision to seek the joys of eternal bliss and to endure temporal hunger and thirst for the Lord’s sake as one who had been invited to the heavenly feasts. And though he knew that the church at Lindisfarne contained many holy men by whose learning and example he might be instructed, yet learning beforehand of the fame of the sublime virtues of the monk and priest Boisil, he preferred to seek Melrose. And by chance it happened that, having jumped down from his horse on reaching the monastery, and being about to enter the church to pray, he gave both his horse and the spear he was holding to a servant, for he had not yet put off his secular habit.

  Ignoring modern roads and remembering that in the seventh century there were no bridges over the Tweed or the Leader (not since the Romans abandoned their great military depot at Trimontium, at the foot of the Eildon Hills), I had pored over large-scale Ordnance Survey maps, the excellent Pathfinder series in particular, looking for traces of disused tracks, and also consulted as many old maps as I could find. In order to reach Old Melrose, I had concluded that Cuthbert had had to go south-east from Wrangham to wade with his horse and servant across the Tweed at the Monksford, an ancient crossing about a mile south of the monastery.

  From Brotherstone Farm, an old C road led to the hamlet of Bemersyde on a ridge above the river’s floodplain. And, from there, I reckoned the route turned south and downhill to Dryburgh, where the romantic ruins of a twelfth-century abbey now stand. From there, Cuthbert would have followed the banks of the Tweed north to the ford. That made sense to me, as the most likely path. And when I was checking my maps one last time before packing them in my rucksack, I noticed that a solitary ash tree had been plotted on the Pathfinder by the side of the road, about four or five hundred yards east of Brotherstone Farm. I wondered if this was a relic of the row of ash trees pointed out by the Rev. W.L. Sime and the Berwickshire Naturalists’ Club in the summer of 1930.

  By the time I shouldered my pack (spare socks, pants, a towel, a waterproof, a copy of Colgrave’s translation of the Anonymous Life and Bede’s version, maps, a spare pen and notebook, a fully charged mobile phone, cheese sandwiches, chocolate and a hat) and gone off to look for the ash tree, the sun had climbed and my body warmer quickly became too warm. Despite walking back and forth on the road, consulting reference points on my two overlapping Pathfinders and searching amongst the thickly overgrown hedgerows and field-ends, I could find no sign of the ash tree, or even its stump, and retraced my steps to the farm and the C road, disappointed at a false start, something I had already experienced at Brotherstone.

  Almost immediately, I knew that this was an ancient route. When the fraying tarmac swung west at Third Farm, the track grew narrow, made not for modern vehicles but for carts, riders and those on foot. On either side were heavily overgrown but deep ditches, dug to catch the rainwater run-off, and in the middle were the intermittent remains of a crest. Between the ditches and the fields ran long avenues of very old hardwood trees. Some had been blackened by lightning strikes
, others had lost their heartwood and were regrowing around the edges, or had sent out suckers or seedlings. The hedges between the trees were broad and very dense, good winter shelter for small animals and birds, and full of summer and autumn goodness, with their harvest of rosehips, wild raspberries, brambles and haws of several sorts. It was impossible to see through the thick branches and abundant foliage.

  From the farm at Third, the old road began to climb gently and through field entries I could see long, sunlit vistas to the south, the Tweed and Teviot valleys and beyond them, the watershed ridge of the Cheviots. I met no one on the road, and no farm traffic. The landscape seemed to doze in the sun and, as I began the metronomic rhythm of putting one foot in front of another, my senses began to drift, absorbing little more than the warmth, the scents of the land and its summer glories. On both sides barley fields stretched across undulating, free-draining ground, the ripening, heavy heads rippling in the breeze. Near the top of the rise I had been steadily climbing, the old road crossed a green loaning, a wide path that ran south to north. It had probably been used for driving flocks and herds to the high summer pasture on the flanks of the Bemersyde, Brotherstone and Redpath hills. Its hedges had not been trimmed for many years and the hot summer had seen them soar in height like rows of small trees. As I breathed the clean air, taking my time through this place of, it seemed, complete peace, I wondered why Cuthbert wanted to leave it for the seclusion and austerity of life at Old Melrose. Was there turmoil in his soul? Why was this not enough?