To the Island of Tides

by Alistair Moffat

  The remarkable summer of 2018 ignited a more intense debate about global warming and what our impact has been on the climate. These issues are vast, many of them technical, and the politics that reverberate around them often just as extreme as the changing weather. Instead of a Second Creation, we or our grandchildren may witness an apocalypse. And where shall we run to then?

  Attitudes clearly have to change and soften, but I fear it may take too long for the extremes of the climate to have that effect. Instead, the stories of Cuthbert, other early saints and their animals around them may offer a more immediate way of understanding how the world might work better. Over the last twenty-five years, my own attitudes have changed radically because of my family’s direct interaction with animals, our efforts to understand them and to help them understand us.

  When we first came to our farmhouse, I suggested that our young daughters might like to ride. Close at hand there was a good riding school and, if over the space of a year they enjoyed lessons there and came to understand the hard work and responsibility of looking after horses, then maybe we would find them their own ponies. This was not the reaction of well-heeled city dwellers converting to country ways. I had grown up in the Borders, with its strong equestrian traditions borne out of the annual festivals held in each town that are known as common ridings. One way or another, most people, regardless of status or income, who wanted to ride had their own horse and were usually able to find grazing and stabling. Equestrianism in the Borders was not and is not the preserve of the posh or entitled; it is woven into the fabric of society and has been for centuries.

  And so in 1995 there began a long family love affair with horses that has reached new and different heights. My daughters gained much by riding; both have a stillness, sympathy and gentleness that comes from close relationships with these noble creatures. And the usual self-centred obsessions of teenagers were much tempered by the love and responsibility they felt for their horses. After they went to university and gradually gave up riding, my wife began to breed horses, a tremendously demanding and risky undertaking. Now she is the owner of a very beautiful and enormously talented dressage performer. This extraordinary little coloured mare is a double Scottish and British champion at novice level, and barring injury, to say nothing of tempting fate, we believe that she may have a long and illustrious career ahead of her. But the point here is not to document success (there has been plenty of failure, too) but to make a simple connection with Cuthbert’s relationship with the sea otters and the birds. Equestrianism is the only sport where women and men form a similar relationship with an animal, where they need to communicate with the horse in complex ways, understand its needs in the absence of speech and develop powerful bonds of trust, even love.

  Horses change people. They have changed me. And observing and coping with their behaviour can be a means of better understanding more of the natural world, as well as a way of softening attitudes. No one who genuinely likes horses is anything other than thoughtful around them (of course, there are some whose sharp competitive instincts are not attractive, but even they usually know enough not to communicate ill humour if they want a horse to perform for them) and in grooming, management and riding they try to avoid sudden movement, loud noises or anything upsetting. It is well understood that people with mental health issues can find some peace helping in a stable yard, and in a remarkable development three American airlines now allow miniature ‘service’ horses to travel with passengers who need the reassurance of their presence. Being close to these gentle animals is a good beginning in life and also a harking back to an older Britain – long before the racket and rush of cities, and the industrial revolution – a time when our land was quiet and green, and completely dependent on horses for traction and transport. A time when we had to understand and communicate with these animals.

  Soon after we moved to the farmhouse, we built three loose boxes by the burn at the bottom of the slope. They became home to my daughters’ horses and a dapple-grey Connemara mare my wife rode. Gradually our small farm became a hub of animal activity of all sorts. The horses’ muck heap brought flies that in turn attracted swallows, who began to nest in the loose boxes. Around the paddocks close to the farmhouse we planted hedges and trees that became home to more birds, hedgehogs and rabbits, and sometimes in the late evenings we saw the grey shapes of roe deer grazing the farthest pasture. In the dry summer of 2018 many house martins came, their white striped tails flashing in the sun, and in the warm evenings we watched enthralled at the daredevil aerobatics of thirty or forty birds swirling around the sky above the steading and the stables, feeding on flies, feeding their chicks under the eaves of the house, feeling the elemental joy of being alive.

  I am well aware that being in the midst of all this vibrancy and joy is a privilege, something not readily accessible to many. But it is a choice. All of our dwindling resources are spent on keeping this farm and its animals going, and it can be a very expensive business. We take no holidays because we cannot afford to and, in any case, who would look after our fifteen horses, three dogs and maintain the fields, fences, tracks and all the unexpected things that managing a farm entails? Of equal concern is our physical ability to continue to look after the animals without resorting to shortcuts. Nearing the end of our seventh decades, we have to limit the amount of time we spend in the evening complaining about aches, small breaks (toes, the occasional rib) and near-constant arthritic pain because if we did not, we would talk of little else.

  Cities and large towns have largely separated Britain’s people from the animals they used to live close to and now all most people see are pets and occasionally rats, mice and urban foxes. It is certainly a great loss, a wide gap in experiencing the wholeness of the world, but what I had not understood was the spiritual nature of our daily contact with our horses, dogs and the wild animals around us. Cuthbert’s stories and the notion of the harmony of the Second Creation reminded me that even non-Christians can understand the value of being much closer to the creatures with whom we share the planet – and who make it habitable.

  By mid-afternoon, the sun had climbed high above Old Melrose and, having forgotten to bring a hat, I sought the shade of the woods to the north-west of the river peninsula. Magnificent trees towered above me: wellingtonias, Scots pines, oaks, spear-straight poplars, shimmering aspens and others I could not identify, all of them the glorious consequence of the selfless foresight of late nineteenth-century planting. Through the woods, I could see the glint of the Tweed as it began to turn, its course first forced east and then south by the glowering red sandstone mass of the river cliff. The great river has its own watery map, the names of pools, beats and rapids usually conferred by fishermen. Where the Tweed turns most sharply, the uncountable millennia of spates and battering ice floes will have scoured its bed and made it very deep, and even in that rainless summer the pool known as the Crom Weil looked dark and dangerous, as unseen currents churned below the placid surface. Crom is from Old Welsh, the language of the Tweed Valley before Cuthbert’s people brought Early English, and it simply means ‘a bend’. Weil is cognate to ‘wheel’ and may refer to the motion of the currents. Or it could be related to the word wael for ‘a pool’. River names are often the oldest in the landscape and their origins difficult to parse.

  To the south of the plateau of Old Melrose, the pools remember the centuries of the monks. Where there is a sliver of a long, low river island, the map plots Halliwell Stream, and as the river turns slowly towards Monksford, the pool is marked as Holy Weil. These may have been the shallower reaches of the Tweed where mortification of the flesh was practised.

  Immersion in bone-chilling water was common and the most extreme example is the story of Drythelm, a monk at Old Melrose in the decades on either side of AD 700. As a layman he had fallen into what was probably a coma and, according to Bede, was resurrected as though from death. To astonished audiences, he then related a vision, a journey in the company of ‘a handsome man in a shinin
g robe . . . to a very broad and deep valley of infinite length’, what sounds like an early visit to a version of purgatory. Because many believed that Drythelm had glimpsed what lies beyond death, people often came to Old Melrose to listen to his account of his vision, including King Aldfrith of Northumbria. At the close of his passage about Drythelm, Bede described how the monk often immersed himself in the River Tweed, no matter the season:

  This man was given a more secluded dwelling in the monastery, so that he could devote himself more freely to the service of his Maker in unbroken prayer. And since this place stands on the bank of a river, he often used to enter it for severe bodily penance, and plunge repeatedly beneath the water while he recited psalms and prayers for as long as he could endure it, standing motionless with the water up to his loins and sometimes to his neck. When he returned to shore, he never removed his dripping, chilly garments, but let them warm and dry on his body. And in winter, when the half-broken cakes of ice were swirling around him, which he had broken to make a place to stand and dip himself in the water, those who saw him used to say: ‘Brother Drythelm (for that was his name), it is wonderful how you can manage to bear such bitter cold.’ To which he, being a man of simple disposition and self-restraint, would reply simply: ‘I have known it colder.’ And when they said: ‘It is extraordinary that you are willing to practise such severe discipline,’ he used to answer: ‘I have seen greater suffering.’ So until the day of his summons from this life he tamed his aged body by daily fasting, inspired by an insatiable longing for the blessings of heaven, and by his words and life he helped many people to salvation.

  Now, this borders on Pythonesque pastiche, but nevertheless it has the whiff of authenticity. Immersion carries overtones of cleansing and repeated re-dedication by baptism, and as the water reached his loincloth it will also have been very effective in suppressing the desires of the flesh, the early medieval equivalent of a cold shower. While Drythelm shivered amongst the ice floes, more gentle sorts of devotion also took place on the river peninsula.

  As Bede remarked, Cuthbert could have chosen to enter the monastery at Lindisfarne but instead chose to come to Old Melrose explicitly because of the reputation of Boisil. By the time he had retreated for his first period at the hermitage on Inner Farne, the saint remembered the old man very fondly when he spoke to visitors:

  I have known many of those who, both in purity of heart and in loftiness of prophetic grace, far exceed me in my weakness. Among these is the venerable servant of Christ, Boisil, a man to be named with all honour, who formerly in his old age, when I was but a youth, brought me up in the monastery of Melrose, and, amid his instructions, predicted with prophetic truth all the things which were to happen to me.

  Cuthbert and Boisil became soul-friends. A translation from Irish Gaelic, anam-cara, it is an attractive description of close affection and kindness, and it carried a further sense of one being a teacher and confessor, the other a pupil and disciple. As time went on at Old Melrose, and Cuthbert’s faith and knowledge accumulated, there seems to have grown a strong bond, as each monk held up a mirror to the other’s soul. But in 664, when Cuthbert had probably been at Old Melrose for thirteen years, the soul-friends were sorely tested.

  In that year Adomnan, Abbot of Iona, recorded the coming of a great pestilence, what was known as the Yellow Plague, a recurrence of the devastating Plague of Justinian. Cuthbert was infected and Bede wrote of ‘the swelling which appeared in his thigh’, a symptom of bubonic plague. But the young monk survived, as some did, saying, ‘And why do I lie here? For doubtless God has not despised the prayers of so many good men. Give me my staff and shoes.’ For the rest of his life, Cuthbert felt the painful effects of this terrible illness, but he was more fortunate than his soul-friend.

  Much older, Boisil knew that when he too was infected, he would die quickly, having seen others consumed by plague, and he predicted that the end would come in seven days. But instead of seeking consolation or sympathy, he told Cuthbert that he should lose ‘no opportunity of learning from me so long as I am able to teach you’. The young monk asked Boisil what would be best for him to read for the days that remained, and they agreed on the Gospel of St John. ‘I have a book of seven gatherings of which we can get through one every day, with the Lord’s help, reading it and discussing it between ourselves.’ Instead of a deeper analysis of the text, the soul-friends decided to speak only of simple things such as the ‘faith which worketh by love’. And once they had completed their readings and discussions, Boisil died and ‘entered into the joy of perpetual light’.

  The reality is likely to have been very different, very grim indeed. Scientists and historians now believe that the Yellow Plague of the seventh century resembled the Black Death of the middle of the fourteenth century. The Italian writer Giovanni Boccaccio left a description of what happened when an individual was infected with that later plague: ‘At the beginning of the malady, certain swellings either on the groin or under the armpits . . . waxed to the bigness of a common apple, others to the size of an egg . . . and these are the plague boils.’

  These boils or buboes oozed blood and pus and the flesh began to blacken around them. As the disease raged through a victim’s body, they suffered terribly with fever, sleeplessness, vomiting, diarrhoea and severe pain before the mercy of death took them. Cuthbert’s soul-friend will have suffered these hideous symptoms before he reached his last day, which was spent ‘in great gladness’, as Boisil longed for the comfort of death, consoled as much as was possible by readings from scripture.

  We will all face the moment of death alone, but instead of staring at a chill and bleak horizon of nothingness, Boisil’s hand was held fast by his anam-cara, who was with him until his last moment, reassuring him as his eyes closed that a benign God waited to welcome him into eternity.

  Unlike Cuthbert and Boisil, and in common with many others, I do not have the comfort of a belief in God or in heaven, but I do think that the prospect of holding the hand of a soul-friend as the breath finally slips out of me is a warming one. No one knows me better or loves me more than my wife. I love her too, and we have been together for more than forty-five years. Of course there have been good and bad times, but none of that will matter when I find myself in the imminent presence of the wide solitude of death because she will be holding my hand. I can go then.

  My friend Richard Holloway has recently written wonderfully and movingly about facing death in his Waiting for the Last Bus. He makes the point that unlike the seventh century, when death from all manner of causes, including bubonic plague, stared Cuthbert, Boisil and their contemporaries in the face, we now live in a society that seems to deny its inevitability and does everything medically possible to preserve life. And while Richard would never presume to offer a prescription on how to deal with our deaths, he does make an excellent suggestion, something he himself has done. Since there is nothing one can do to avoid extinction, why not plan your own funeral? His view is that it should provide some comfort to know what will happen when you are buried or cremated, even if you cannot be there. Even though it feels strange to contemplate this, I think he is right. Boisil planned his last days, amidst all that gathering agony, and that seemed to give him – and his soul-friend – some consolation.

  No doubt the old monk was also comforted by forgiveness. If Cuthbert assumed the role of confessor, and as his anam-cara he surely must have, then he will have given Boisil absolution for his sins. At the moment of death, I can understand why forgiveness is important. Even though I have no belief in God and do not therefore seek the forgiveness of anyone other than my family or close friends, I do not want to die unforgiven for all the mistakes and omissions I have made, some of them mean and selfish. As it draws to a close, I want to feel that I have lived a decent life and done more good than harm.

  Some time in 664, Cuthbert succeeded Boisil as Prior of Old Melrose, but the Anonymous Life and Bede’s are unclear about how long he served in that office. ‘Per aliquot
annos’ is the phrase used, and it can mean ‘for some years’, either many or a few. It seemed that amongst his most urgent duties, the new prior walked the valleys and villages of the Tweed basin preaching the word of God on missions of re-conversion. The devastation of the Yellow Plague had caused many to return to the old pagan gods.

  After Cuthbert’s elevation in 664, the Anonymous Life contains a brief and enigmatic passage, ‘but finally he fled from worldly glory and sailed away privately and secretly’. Since leaving the monastery without the permission of the abbot is a serious transgression that does not fit into the picture of an exemplary life, Bede glosses over this episode. But it seems very important: a moment in the narrative that jars and one that caught my attention. Why did Cuthbert leave Old Melrose? Did he have a breakdown after the death of his soul-friend? Or did he pine for the solitary purity of life as a hermit? One aspect is at least clear: Cuthbert must have left his monastery secretly by boat.

  5

  In the Arms of Angels

  In the sixth, seventh and eighth centuries Irish monks, mystics and missionaries put their trust in God and sailed the wild seas off the western coasts in search of promised lands. Place-names trace their epic voyages. In the Faroese language, papars specifically means ‘Irish monks’, and the islands of the west and north remember their wanderings: Pabbay and Bayble in the Hebrides, Papa Westray in Orkney, Papa Stour in Shetland, Papey off Iceland, and many others. Faith took the saints great distances and the most famous and farthest travelled was St Brendan the Navigator. With fourteen companions, he sailed the North Atlantic through ice floes and past monsters and apparitions, before setting a course by Hesperus, the Evening Star, and making landfall on a shore cold with seals and angels.