To the Island of Tides

by Alistair Moffat

  Only wisps of cloud flitted across an open blue sky and after a mile or two of gently climbing I fished out my hat. A track led diagonally up the flank of the ridge and, as I neared the watershed, I turned to look out to the west. Even though I was not yet at the highest part of the Kyloe Hills, I could see even further than from Cuddy’s Cave. Beyond Yeavering Bell, I was astonished to make out the three Eildon Hills shimmering, just discernible in the morning haze. As the crow flies, they must have been more than thirty-five miles away. And when I finally reached the top of the ridge, I looked east to the sea. Lit by the morning sun, low-lying and green in a blue sea, lay Lindisfarne. At last, journey’s end, and perhaps a new beginning.

  I could make out the castle rock, the village and the sand dunes to the north. Immediately breaking my self-imposed rule, I stopped to stare at what seemed like a mirage. It occurred to me that on this low hilltop Cuthbert could have seen Eildon Hill North watching over Old Melrose, the place he had sailed away from privately and secretly, and when he turned he beheld the island of Aidan and the monastery he founded. Amongst these craggy little hills and the moors to the west, I believe Cuthbert lived a hermetic life for a time, making his covenant with silence as he fought devils and sought to move closer to God. Perhaps in this liminal place, between the tumult of the world to the west – the palace at Yeavering and the ecclesiastical politics of Old Melrose – and to the east the holy island of Lindisfarne, he may have wished to pass all of his days. And, like Aidan, be borne up to heaven in the arms of angels.

  As I climbed a little higher, the coastline opposite Lindisfarne came gradually into view and I could see that vehicles had begun to cross the causeway. At the concrete trig point, I put down my rucksack and pulled out a body warmer. It was a blessed relief, for I was beginning to feel the weight of it. But it led to other frustrations. Getting the straps correctly aligned so that I could hoist the pack back on my back was maddeningly difficult. They constantly hanked on my sleeves or my watch strap as I bent over, cursing and huffing. Below the trig point, a smaller outcrop of rock on the other side of a stone dyke had a cairn on it and I decided on a brief diversion. I like cairns. But before I could find a good stone to add to it, I came across the body of a kestrel. It had been brought down, I suspect, by a shotgun and then later eviscerated by some carrion-eater.

  In the woods to the south of the Kyloe Hills, I climbed slowly and carefully down to the site of St Cuthbert’s Cave. It is a spectacular freak of geology. High, long and about twelve or fourteen feet deep in places, the rock that overhangs it looks as though it has been pulled out like a drawer. The vast weight of this roof is held up, it seems, by an impossibly slim column of much-eroded stone. If the fleeing monks did indeed stop here, many of them and the precious relics they carried would have found shelter in this capacious natural room.

  On a large, rounded boulder by the entrance to the cave, I saw that a headstone-like inscription had been carved in memory of Mildred and Ernest Leather, the latter dying in 1916. What amazed me was that two further inscriptions had been carved to Vivien Leather in 1997 and Anne Berens (her married sister?) in 2001. Perhaps their ashes were scattered on the site. St Cuthbert’s Cave is cared for by the National Trust and they would no doubt have frowned on its appropriation as a memorial to a family. And yet someone had arrived, presumably in broad daylight, with a mallet and a chisel – and left the name of the family responsible for a strange variety of vandalism. Very surprising and intriguing. Inside the cave, mostly on the back wall, there were a great many more names and some dates. Some were sets of graffiti-like initials daubed or scratched onto the rock, but others had been cut with a chisel, some skilfully. There were even several runic inscriptions. This leaving of names at a place associated with Cuthbert was something I was to see often.

  Well signposted and with good going, St Cuthbert’s Way led me down the eastern slopes of the Kyloe Hills past a large plantation of mostly evergreen forestry and towards the village of Fenwick. I reckoned that I had at least four hours to reach the causeway before the tide started to come in and I fell into a metronomic rhythm of walking quickly, trying to ignore the weight of my rucksack, the pain in my left shoulder, and my dodgy leg and back problems. Perhaps leathery old Drythelm would have approved of all of this discomfort, the twenty-first-century equivalent of a hair shirt. Good for my tattered soul.

  At a place appropriately named Blawearie, St Cuthbert’s Way became a C road that led pleasingly downhill to Fenwick. As I marched through the village, I noted that one of the houses was called Cuthbert’s Rest. Not quite yet. At the foot of the main, in fact the only, street in Fenwick lay a very busy T-junction. The A1 thundered past and brought me abruptly back into the present, as articulated lorries hurtled north and south. I had to wait a long time to cross safely. A winding country road took me down to Fenwick Granary, where an old mill seemed to be in the process of renovation. I hoped they would install good soundproofing to screen out the near-constant drone of traffic. An old metalled track turned uphill off the C road and gave me a view of the seashore that told me I had allowed ample time. But I had another problem, something that was urgent. There being no public toilets and, I fervently hoped, no other walkers following me, I squatted down behind a bush and reflected on dignity and its departure.

  Uninterrupted and unobserved, except by some well-fed ewes, I tightened my belt and did not slacken my pace. Others must have been more leisurely, for on top of a fence post someone had left an empty mug. The uphill path is marked on the Ordnance Survey as the Fishers’ Back Road and is clearly old, with cobbled metalling that helped me keep up a good swinging rhythm. Once I reached the top of the path, Lindisfarne seemed comfortingly close, the coast only three wide fields away and the beginning of the causeway only a few yards further on. It seemed at that point I had wildly overestimated how long it would take me to walk from the Kyloe Hills and Holburn.

  As I turned downhill along a field edge, the Edinburgh train suddenly hooted and hurtled north on the main line. I had forgotten how close to the island the railway runs, but I could not yet make out how the path crossed it. At first I thought there must be a tunnel, but when I walked closer I saw that it was a pedestrian level-crossing, something I had never seen before. Unmissable signs told me I was at Fenham Hill, where trains travelling in excess of 100 miles an hour passed, and that before crossing I had to phone the signalman. There was a small yellow cabinet with a handset in it. Sadly but sensibly, there was also a sign put up by the Samaritans with a phone number to call. ‘Talk To Us if things are getting to you’.

  The signalman answered immediately and told me to stay off the line and call back. Moments later, the London train thundered past at a blistering speed, shifting the air so violently that I rocked back on my heels. When it had passed, in a matter of seconds, I called again and this time the signalman asked me how long it would take for me to cross the line.

  ‘About twenty or thirty seconds,’ I said.

  ‘OK, you can cross now, if you go immediately and call me back when you reach the other side.’

  Which I did. But very soon after I replaced the second handset another train travelling at high speed raced past. It seemed that escaping the tumult of the twenty-first century was going to involve drama as well as distance.

  Once across the intervening fields, I came at last to the coast and began, it seemed, to pass through more barriers. Behind me I could still hear the hum of the A1 and another train as it rattled and clacked northwards, but the sounds of engines were slowly fading. At the seaward end of the last field, I sidestepped through a kissing gate to find myself walking between memories of warfare. Strung out in two long parallel lines were massive concrete cubes, part of the North Sea’s coastal defences in the Second World War. Designed to prevent tanks and other vehicles coming ashore and creating a mainland bridgehead for an invasion force that had sailed from German or Dutch ports, they looked bluntly immovable, an enduring monument to victory in a just war fou
ght against the manifest evils of Nazism. Far from seeing the huge cubes as a disfigurement in a beautiful, natural landscape, I understood them as part of the means by which such beauty was preserved and made accessible to all. At the end of the rows of cubes, where the road from Beal cuts through to the beginning of the causeway, a large, red sign warned, ‘No Shooting’. Not something the Wehrmacht would have paid much attention to as their Panzers rumbled into the heart of Northumberland.

  Since the beginning of written record, war has lapped around the shores of Lindisfarne. Spreading out my unwieldy Explorer map on one of the concrete cubes, I wanted to find the outfall of a stream called the South Low (pronounced like ‘how’). It was there that a pivotal episode in another war for Britain took place.

  Ten years before the slaughter by the River Swale at Catterick in 600, a coalition of native British kings rode with their warbands to Lindisfarne, their ponies cantering on the hard sand of the beach, their pennants fluttering in the wind. Led by Urien Yrechwydd, the Lord of the Tides and King of Rheged, and with allied contingents commanded by Riderch Hen, King of Strathclyde, Gaullauc, King of Elmet and Morcant Bwlch, a prince who may have ruled on the Tweed, the British army had fought a successful campaign against the hosts of the Anglian invaders who had built a fortress on the rock at Bamburgh and begun to extend their reach over its hinterland. These ancestors of Cuthbert and the Northumbrian kings had originally sailed from Angeln in southern Denmark in such numbers that Bede wrote of their homeland being deserted. It may have suffered badly from flooding. Angeln means ‘Hookland’. The first element of the name survives in angling, the more precise term for fishing with a hooked line. The Angles from Angeln gave England its name, but history might have produced an alternative rendering – Hookland.

  For the doings of kings, saints, farmers and ordinary people of the sixth, seventh and eighth centuries, there is scant written record, with the sole really solid source being the work of Bede. His Ecclesiastical History of the English People was exactly that and it paid only occasional attention to the native British and their kings. There are long gaps of silence in what is rightly known as the Dark Ages, and so any and all sorts of texts have to be considered, some of them undoubtedly doubtful.

  One of these rare sources is both infuriating and fascinating. At some point in the ninth century, probably in a remote monastery somewhere in the Celtic west of Britain, Nennius or Ninya sharpened his quills and compiled the Historia Brittonum, the ‘History of the Britons’. Unblushing, the monk wrote in the preface that he had ‘made a heap’ of all the material he could find: genealogies, bardic sources, traditions, stories involving dragons and giants, and some reports of events that may have actually taken place. The latter mostly sound and feel plausible, and these may have formed part of a lost manuscript, a ‘History of Northern Britain’, that was probably written in Strathclyde, the kingdom of Riderch Hen. Had it survived, it may have complemented Bede’s account of the English people. Here is an important passage:

  Hussa reigned 7 years. Four kings fought against him, Urien and Riderch hen, and Gaullauc and Morcant. Theodoric fought bravely against the famous Urien and his sons. During that time, sometimes the enemy, sometimes our countrymen were victorious, and Urien blockaded them for 3 days on the island of Medcaut.

  Hussa and Theodoric were successors of Ida, the first of the line of Northumbrian kings, and he had made Bamburgh his capital place, building a stockade on the great seamark rock. Its name changed from Din Guauroy when it became Bamburgh, originally Bebbanburh, and named after Ida’s queen, Bebba. The passage from Nennius uses another old name that has the shadow of a story behind it. Old Welsh was spoken across Britain in various dialects, and over the four centuries of the province of Britannia it borrowed a great deal from Latin, often by simply adapting terms and names, disguising them with what the ignorant see as eccentric spelling, the use of consonants as vowels and so on. Ynys Medcaut is simply a rendering of Insula Medicata.

  Urien appears to have been a dominant figure in the second half of the sixth century. Ruling over Rheged, he was able to create and lead a British coalition as well as prevail in at least two battles celebrated by the bards. The evidence for any sort of history of Urien’s post-Roman kingdom in the north is gossamer-thin. Place-names offer hints of how far his writ ran. To the west of Galloway, near Stranraer, is the village of Dunragit and it derives from Dun Rheged, the Fort of Rheged. It lies close to Luce Bay, the sea and the wide waters of the Solway Firth. Along its northern shore are the remains of two fortresses at the Mote of Mark and Trusty’s Hill that were probably garrisoned by Rheged’s warriors. It was a sea kingdom communicating with itself by boat and trading far and wide with outsiders. Glass from the Rhineland and the Mediterranean has been found, as well as the crucibles and moulds used by jewellery makers. Working mainly with bronze, which could shine to a deep lustre, they made brooches, belt buckles and other fine objects that could be worn. The coloured glass from Europe was used as inlays or for enamelling.

  Near Gatehouse of Fleet, Trusty’s Hill seems also to have been a royal stronghold of Rheged. In 2012, archaeologists uncovered evidence of more luxury objects and the remains of pottery containers that brought wine from central France. The southern shores of the Solway, what is now Cumbria, also seemed to form part of Rheged and it may have extended far to the south at one time. The ancient name of Rochdale in Lancashire is Recedham. While this last is a shaky assumption, the origins of Urien himself and the centre of his power will bear a little more weight. The name derives from Urbgen and it means ‘born in the city’. And the city was Carlisle, the hinge of the sea kingdom of Rheged. Even when Cuthbert visited in 685, the fabric of the old Roman city had faded but had not been submerged in decay. Waga, the royal reeve or prefect, showed the saint a working fountain that must have been fed by an intact acqueduct and cistern. When a church dedicated to Cuthbert was built some time after 698, its alignment, still observable, sits not on the traditional east to west axis but follows the rectilinear street grid of the old city. The Roman walls still stood in the late seventh century and as late as the twelfth; the chronicler William of Malmesbury saw a large arched building with an inscription to Mars and Venus on it.

  The glories of Rheged, the prowess of its warbands, the opulence of its jewellery, and the feasts and wine-drinking in its halls, were fleeting. Archaeologists working at both the Mote of Mark and Trusty’s Hill have found clear evidence that they were destroyed by fire at the end of the seventh century, only a handful of years after Urien’s army saddled their ponies and rode to Lindisfarne.

  In another passage from the Historia Brittonum, Nennius noted that the British kings and their warbands made camp at Aber Lleu and my trusty edition of Y Geiriadur Mawr, the Great Welsh Dictionary, translates that as ‘the Estuary of the Low’. Passing more rows of concrete cubes, I found the little stream easily enough as it flowed onto the sands by a rocky outcrop marked on the map as Beal Point. A necessary source of fresh water for men and horses, and rising ground that gave a good vantage point to watch for movement from the Angles blockaded on Lindisfarne, it was a good place to make camp. Urien and the British kings had defeated Theodoric’s warbands, driven him to seek refuge on the island and had come to the Low to drive him into the sea. Here is another passage from Nennius, one that relates what happened next:

  But while he was on the expedition, Urien was assassinated, on the initiative of Morcant, from jealousy, because his military skill surpassed that of all the other generals.

  The action and its motivation seem clear enough, but bardic sources add a little colour to the murder on the banks of the little stream. Urien was killed in his tent at dead of night by Lloflan Llaf Difo, which sounds like a conferred name since it means ‘severing hand’. The great king’s head was cut off and perhaps displayed to confirm his death. The British coalition quickly dissolved, the Angles escaped from their island prison, and the whole history of Britain turned decisively in a different dire
ction. If Urien had lived and expelled the Angles from the north, England may have become known as Saxony and been a smaller province south of the River Trent, the capital of all Britain might have become York, and we might all be speaking another language.

  After Urien’s murder his son, Owain, succeeded and won victories against the Angles. But the tides of history were running against him and the retreat of native British power to its last western heartlands began. In response to sustained adversity, a surprising, heroic tradition grew in Wales and elsewhere. As the Angles and the Saxons in the south overran more and more territory, the bards never allowed their people to forget that Welsh-speaking kings once ruled in London. They called the English-controlled parts of England Lloegyr and it means ‘the lost lands’. In Dyfed, during the reign of Hywel Dda, a poem known as the ‘Armes Prydein Vawr’ (the ‘Prophecy of Great Britain’) was composed. It called on the British of the Old North in Strathclyde, in Cumbria and in Cornwall to unite with the Vikings under the Banner of St David and drive the English back into the sea.

  Alongside this, there grew a hope for a redeemer, Y Mab Darogan, the Son of Prophecy. He would emerge to lead the Welsh back to their ancient glories, to victories over the hated Sais, the invading English who stole the Holy Island of Britain from its rightful rulers. The bards sang of nine Sons of Prophecy: Hiriell; Cynan; Cadwaladr; Arthur; Owain ap Urien; Llywelyn Vawr, the medieval Prince of Wales; Owain Lawgoch; Owain Glyn Dwr; and Henry Tudor.