To the Island of Tides

by Alistair Moffat

  Brendan’s account of what he called ‘The Journey to the Promised Land’ strongly suggests that he found America 1,000 years before Columbus. In 1976 Tim Severin set sail from southern Ireland in the St Brendan to follow the course implied in the sixth-century account and, mostly relying on the same navigational aids as the Irish abbot, he reached the Labrador coast. The much shorter voyage of Columba from the north of Ireland to Scotland’s Atlantic shore in the mid-sixth century recalls the sort of boat used by Brendan and Severin. Tradition holds that the saint made landfall on the western side of the tiny island of Iona in 563 at a bay known as Port na Curraigh.

  Curraghs were made from ox-hides sewn together, stretched over a frame of whippy green rods (hazel was much favoured) to keep the hull taut, and caulked with wool grease. Rowing benches were wedged in as thwarts to make the canoe-like shape as rigid as possible. Tim Severin was surprised to find that his large sea-going curragh of the sort sailed by Brendan and Columba could scud across the waves at speeds of twelve knots, faster than some modern yachts. This happened because these simple leather boats were very light, had no keel to create resistance and consequently took a shallower draught, with smaller curraghs needing less than a foot of water to float them. Tossed on the big seas of the North Atlantic, Severin often felt a lack of something Brendan had in abundance – faith in God.

  Construction was quick and easy once the ox-hides had been cured and repairs and patching were not difficult. St Brendan and his monks took spare ox-hides and wood with them on their voyage to the promised land. Many years ago I found myself in Cork and I went to a small, even ramshackle, boatyard on the banks of the River Lee, opposite the Beamish brewery, to watch Padraic O’Duinnin build a small curragh. Working alone, and never once using a measure of any sort, he built the boat in a morning, using treated canvas instead of ox-hide. When he had finished, he showed complete confidence in his skills by immediately floating the little curragh on the river.

  Since Old Melrose and Lindisfarne were founded by Irish monks from Iona, there can be little doubt that they brought the simple technology of curragh and coracle (a smaller, round version used on lochs and smaller rivers) building to the banks of the Tweed. And equally there can also be little doubt that the great river was an ancient and medieval highway. Excavations at Trimontium, the great Roman army depot only a mile or so upstream from the monastery, have uncovered a steering paddle, probably intended for use on a raft, and also much evidence of the sort of bulk transport only possible on water, large wine amphorae and the like. In the twenty-first century, the only craft seen on the Tweed are used for leisure pursuits: the grey rowing boats of fishermen and the kayaks and canoes of white-water competitions. But in the past it was much faster and safer to travel and move goods on water, if at all possible. When Cuthbert stole away from Old Melrose ‘privately and secretly’, the Latin verb used by the writer of the Anonymous Life was ‘enavigavit’. He sailed away, almost certainly in a small curragh, allowing the currents of the Tweed to bear him from worldly glory, beating the dark water with his oars.

  Cuthbert may have slipped out of the monastery ‘occulte’, or secretly, in the dead of night, but I wonder if he had any notion of where he was going. In common with St Brendan, other Irish monks sometimes took to the sea in their curraghs as a means of surrendering themselves to the will of God. Wherever He willed them to be carried by the winds, the tides or the currents was where they would go. ‘Fugiens’, Cuthbert was fleeing from the temptations and cares of the world, and I suspect that at first all he wanted was distance from those and the beginnings of a life of solitude. Curraghs are so light that a small one could easily be picked up by one man and the shallows at Monksford will have presented no difficulty. In less than an hour, the fugitive could have travelled a long way, passing the site of Modan’s diseart at Dryburgh and rounding another loop of the meandering Tweed where St Boisil’s Chapel would later be built.

  The Anonymous Life deals with the flight of Cuthbert in one sentence, while in his prose Life, Bede ignores it. However, there exists another early source that might supply answers to the mystery of what happened to the man of God. Before he composed his prose Life, some time around 705, Bede wrote a shorter version in poetic metre, what is known as the Metrical Life, and in it there exists a passage that does not reappear in his later work. Cuthbert wished to avoid the praise of men and: ‘prefers to wander over the secret tracts of a solitary place, where, with God as witness, he may be free, guarded from the fame of human praise’.

  Between them, these two sentences allow a partial sense of what Cuthbert sought and also what feels like a precipitate departure from Old Melrose, but they do not explain why he gave up the office of prior to wander alone amongst the valleys, woods, moors and hills of the borderland. Perhaps politics and the events of 664 might offer a context, if not a direct motivation.

  In that year, King Oswiu of Northumbria summoned his bishops, abbots and leading churchmen and women to Whitby on the North Yorkshire coast to resolve a dispute. The Church of Rome had devised a formula to fix the date of Easter, the most important festival in the Christian calendar. It was famously movable for reasons long forgotten: in the early centuries after Christ’s death, the Church wanted to avoid a clash with the Jewish Passover, the time when Jesus was arrested, tried and crucified. Probably for reasons of remoteness, the Celtic Church had fallen into the habit of setting a different date, one that ignored the Passover.

  King Oswiu had married Eanfled, a Kentish princess who kept the Roman dates and at Easter he found himself feasting alone. According to his wife, it was still Palm Sunday. But there were difficulties more fundamental than domestic disharmony. In the seventh century, and for a long time afterwards, Christians believed that Easter, their pivotal, defining festival, was the occasion of a great battle between God and Satan. And for God to triumph in that battle, all believers, all of his army of supporters, had to pray for victory – at the same time. It was a matter of sheer numbers.

  There were other issues at stake. The Roman tonsure cut in imitation of the crown of thorns was preferred to the Celtic tonsure cut across the forehead from ear to ear with the hair grown long at the back, a probable harking back to the Druids. When he was first admitted to Old Melrose in 651, Cuthbert will have been tonsured in this way. Rome will have sniffed at such whiffs of the pagan past. In addition, Easter’s date shaped the whole Christian year. All of the other festivals, such as Lent, Ascension Day and Pentecost followed from it and therefore the dispute was not only over one celebration: different dates meant two entirely different liturgical years.

  The politics of what became known as the Synod of Whitby were brutal and when Oswiu ruled in favour of the Roman method of dating Easter, the monks of the Celtic Church simply departed. For Cuthbert, this decision and its timing tugged at the foundations of his faith. He had been instructed in the ways of Aidan and Boisil, and the asceticism of the Irish monks was burned deep into his beliefs. When his soul-friend was taken by the Yellow Plague in 664, the same year as the synod, Cuthbert’s world was turned upside down. Not only would the young monk have struggled to come to terms with the loss of his teacher and confessor, he also assumed the weighty responsibility of the office of prior. In that role, he would have had to make sure that the changes insisted on at Whitby were enforced. Perhaps the older monks at Old Melrose resisted; perhaps Cuthbert tired of ecclesiastical politics and pined once more for the purity of the hermetic life where God governed all.

  While I have never relished the idea of solitude, I well understand some of the instincts that prompted Cuthbert’s departure from the hierarchy of the church, from the establishment that ran seventh-century Northumbria. For different reasons, I have always felt myself to be an outsider. When I left the body warmth of my upbringing in Kelso to go to university in those far-off days when working-class children with some ability had their tuition fees paid by the local authority and a maintenance grant from the Scottish Education Depart
ment, I felt I began to inhabit a no man’s land between two worlds. It is a place I have never left.

  When I found myself at St Andrews University, my speech switched from the Scots of hearth and home to a version of tidied-up English that belonged to what I sensed would be the future. Whatever that might be, it would happen in a language that never quite fitted my mouth, was not mine, and life would be measured and organised according to dictums and customs that were often foreign to me. But no matter its awkwardnesses – I suspect my early attempts at tidied-up English were occasionally hilarious, and I still make mistakes in pronunciation – social mobility was what my parents wanted for me, to have a better, more prosperous and interesting life than they had, and in my dad’s phrase, to get a job where you don’t have to take your jacket off. Both my mother and father were articulate, well-read and highly intelligent people but the opportunities that opened for me were not available to them in the 1930s. And so I felt I could not take any other course than to graduate and find a well-jacketed job, probably as a teacher (no sense in reaching too high) and climb up a few more rungs than they did.

  Of course, I always came home. My bond with my family, especially my mother and my sisters, was strong. And while my dad and I fought, sometimes literally when I grew up and became bigger than him, I loved him. When we were not talking, we could always talk about rugby, and the council estate where we lived was very close to Poynder Park, Kelso’s ground. It turned out that I had a gift for the game, perhaps the only natural talent I ever had. But when I went to university and came home to play for Kelso, I experienced the first real rupture with my past. Because I was a student, paid for by the taxpayers, and almost all of my team-mates were not, there was resentment. Maybe they thought I looked down on them. And because, to be frank, I was more talented, that resentment deepened, particularly at the beginning and end of the season. Those were the times when prestigious and well-attended seven-a-side tournaments took place in the Borders and selection for the Kelso seven was thought to be a privilege, a reward for slogging through the mud and rain of the winter. I was fast, big, could tackle and had good hands, as well as the ability to kick goals, so I was selected ahead of other stalwarts in the team and their annoyance sometimes erupted into foul play and fighting at training sessions. And at the sevens tournaments themselves, one or two of my team-mates would not pass me the ball, even though I was running free into space. It all became so sour that I eventually gave up playing when I was twenty-two, something I bitterly regret. You are given few gifts in life and I threw that one away.

  I felt rejected from a central part of my old life and not certain I was accepted in the uncharted territory of the middle classes. Even though I held high-profile jobs, establishment roles and supposed achievements never persuaded me to join it. My wife and I never networked, using our social life to build relationships that might be useful, and we preferred to make friends with people we liked, our neighbours, and to stay close to our family, especially my sisters and their children.

  I suspect my own predisposition to independence, if not solitude, is what attracts me to Cuthbert. As I do, he had to deal with tensions in his life and upbringing. Perhaps he never resolved them, but at least he followed his own course, fought the demons in his heart and left high office at Old Melrose to try to know the mind of his God. That for me was a powerful motivation to follow in Cuthbert’s wake, as he rowed downriver towards his destiny.

  My broken rib had healed enough so that I could sleep, but my antics on the steep slope below Old Melrose had injured my back so badly that I found walking difficult, something that might be an inhibition later. I consulted a very practical and efficient chiropractor to help get me back on the road. As the years pile up behind me and those in front begin to diminish, I sometimes find myself musing on whether or not bits of me will simply cease to function, and in what order. Will my teeth last? Why has my bladder apparently shrunk to the size of a satsuma, and what is the evolutionary purpose of all that extra hair in my nostrils and ears?

  In any case, I could not follow Cuthbert in my own curragh (and my wife had banned any other sort of craft; in fact, she was uncertain that I should be allowed out without supervision) and so I decided to spend time at places he would have passed on his journey, places of significance that might shine a brighter light on the long past. I thought I knew where he was going, and by the time we reached the secret tracts of a solitary place I hoped I would be able to walk in his footsteps.

  As the Tweed wound its way north-eastwards, Cuthbert was rowing through the heart of turmoil and contradiction, a period of convulsive change all but ignored by Bede. Having expanded slowly from their stronghold on the rock at Bamburgh, the reach of the Anglian kings of Bernicia extended across much of north Northumberland in the second half of the sixth century. In Old Welsh, the language of the native British, Bryneich means something like ‘the land between the hills’ and as it was appropriated by the Bamburgh kings, it morphed into Bernicia. But not without a fight.

  In the year 600 a host mustered in the fortress on Edinburgh’s Castle Rock. These were the warriors of the kings of the Gododdin, and as they reined their swan-maned ponies south over the Lammermuirs their numbers grew in strength, as Cadrod, Lord of Calchvynydd, rode out to join them. Calchvynydd means ‘chalk hill’ and it is the oldest version of the name of Kelso on the banks of the Tweed.

  After they forded the great river, the British cavalry plunged deep into what is now north Northumberland, Durham and north Yorkshire. They were searching for the warbands of the people they knew as Y Gynt, ‘the Gentiles’, the pagan Angles. They finally confronted their enemies at Catraeth, Catterick, on the River Swale, to decide not only who would rule over the north of Britain but also whether or not God’s Christian soldiers would triumph over the heathens and idolators who faced them. For the British knew themselves as Y Bedydd, ‘the Baptised’.

  The Swale ran red with the blood of a great slaughter. On that terrible day, God was mocked, for it was the Anglian pagans who cut down the Baptised. Victory at Catterick was pivotal, for it soon won them control over vast swathes of territory, including much of the Tweed Valley, and their advance northwards was spearheaded by a remarkable general. Aethelfrith was known by his Old Welsh-speaking enemies as Am Fleisaur. It means ‘the Trickster’, or better, ‘the Artful Dodger’. It seems that by stratagem as well as feral ferocity, Aethelfrith led his Anglian warbands to victory at the ancient fortress of Addinston in Upper Lauderdale and elsewhere. After 603, the Christian communities of the Tweed were in the hands of pagan overlords, the immediate ancestors of Cuthbert.

  Between 1952 and 1962, the eminent archaeologist Brian Hope-Taylor discovered something of the nature of the paganism the Angles brought to the Tweed Basin. At Yeavering, now a farm with open fields on the the banks of the River Glen but then a royal centre in the foothills of the Cheviots, not far from Wooler, his excavators found the sole British example of a temple built to honour Anglo-Saxon gods. For the times, it was a large building, seventeen feet across by thirty-five feet long, and under its floor was a pit full of ox skulls and bones, the residue of sacrifice. Evidence from a contemporary burial in North Yorkshire suggested that in addition to cattle, human beings were also killed to propitiate the warlike pagan pantheon of the Angles. A nobleman had been placed in a grave and a living woman thrown on top of the corpse, pinned down and quickly covered with a mound of heavy stones. To prevent her screams from puncturing the solemnity of the ceremony, she may have been gagged.

  In his treatise On the Reckoning of Time, Bede offered more information on the beliefs of his ancestors, even though his primary purpose was to establish a clear chronology for his magisterial Ecclesiastical History of the English People. The AD system of dating he used was invented by Dionysius Exiguus, an Eastern European monk who migrated to Rome in the sixth century. Calculating 1 AD as the year of Christ’s birth, he created the Dionysian tables, which also worked out the correct date of Easter, acce
pted at the Synod of Whitby. But it was Bede’s adoption of this system that established the AD and ultimately the BC method of reckoning time.

  In his treatise some of the Anglian pagan festivals are listed. The most important seems to have been Modranect or Mothers’ Night on 25 December, a clear antecedent of Christmas, while Blodmonath or Blood Month was November, when blood puddings were made after the slaughter of beasts before the onset of winter. Most dynasties in pagan England, including that of Aethelfrith, traced their ancestry from the paramount god, Woden, and he appears to have been closely linked to Thunor, the sky-god of lightning. Tiw was a war god and Friga a goddess of love. The Anglo-Saxon pantheon persisted long enough in Britain to name the days of the week and it seems likely that the conversion of pagans was a process rather than a series of events.

  Sitting on the rowing bench of his curragh, no doubt allowing the current, the expression of God’s will, to carry him downstream, Cuthbert moved through a landscape of great cultural complexity. The Baptised, the elite of native British society, had probably been converted by missionaries who walked over the watershed hills of the south-west of what is now Scotland, the Southern Uplands. In the century following the departure of the Roman provincial administration in 410, Carlisle still functioned as a small city complete with local government, and it was the centre of an early Christian parish, perhaps even a bishopric. Much later, in 685, when Cuthbert had become Bishop of Lindisfarne, he visited the city, and the royal reeve, Waga, gave him a tour of the Roman walls and, according to Bede, showed him ‘a remarkable fountain that was built into them’. Some time around AD 400, a priest left the city to found a church in Galloway, Candida Casa, the Shining White House at Whithorn. Ninian was charged with a mission of conversion and, according to Bede, he preached the word of God to the Southern Picts.