To the Island of Tides

by Alistair Moffat

  I passed the headstones in the churchyard, some of them recent, others bearing the names of several generations. I came across a very new stone, not at all weathered, small and with a gold star chiselled at its top. It read:

  IN LOVING MEMORY OF

  HUGO JOHN ROBERT GLENTON

  20TH APRIL 2017 – 30TH JUNE 2018

  AGED 1 YEAR AND 2 MONTHS

  OUR BEAUTIFUL BABY, FULL OF SMILES.

  ADORED BY ALL WHO CUDDLED HIM.

  And on the plinth:

  WE TREASURE YOUR MEMORY,

  AND THE MIGHT HAVE BEENS,

  YOU’LL FOREVER BE WITH US

  WHEN WE’RE LOST IN OUR DREAMS.

  Jolted at the rawness of recent tragedy, I stood and stared at the little headstone, and after a time began to weep for all of the pain the parents of the wee boy suffered, perhaps the pain he suffered, the grief at the unnatural injustice of the death of a child before his parents, the rage at the loss of his future, and the dignity and power of what they had asked the mason to engrave in his memory. I hoped it was a shred of comfort in all that darkness to know that their baby was buried in ground where saints walked and prayed, in holy ground.

  St Mary’s Church is old. Some of its masonry dates to the twelfth century and the rest to the thirteenth. What still surprises me is its spatial relationship with the medieval priory, built at almost the same time. The two churches are no more than thirty yards from each other and are aligned end to end. My research had told me that this apparently awkward arrangement was characteristic of Anglo-Saxon monasteries and I could understand that both St Mary’s and the priory church would wish to sit on the traditional east–west axis. Between them I saw a massive cross socket, much larger than the one I came across on the road to Dryburgh Abbey. So massive that it is unlikely ever to have been moved, it is a rare relic that survives in situ from the old monastery founded by Aidan in 635, the place where Cuthbert had been buried. And that probably meant I was standing close to its centre, a tall cross that was a focus of prayer, worship and ceremony.

  Crosses like the one that fitted into the massive socket were not the plain, symbolic sort erected in modern churchyards. The early ones told stories. They were used as texts and illustrations by preachers. Engraved, often on all faces of the shaft, the crosses made by the Anglian masons of the kingdom of Northumbria were glorious, elegant and mystical objects of great reverence. Many years ago, I diverted from a journey to Stranraer and the Irish ferries to go and look at the Ruthwell Cross. Erected in the early eighth century, when Northumbria had absorbed the western kingdom of Rheged, it is displayed in a side chapel of a small church in a village between Annan and Dumfries. The gallery arranged around the cross allows visitors to get close and enjoy the virtuosity of the carving. More than sixteen feet tall, it has been reconstructed virtually entire and on the front and back faces of the shaft there are scenes from the life of Christ and episodes from the stories of the Desert Fathers. One of them may be St Anthony of Egypt, a man much admired by the Lindisfarne monks. The sides are decorated with interleaving foliage known as inhabited vine-scroll. Amongst the inhabitants are birds and what might be lions. All of the vignettes and biblical scenes, as well as the decorations on the cross-piece itself, would have been painted in bright colours: ochre reds and yellows, blues and greens from plant extracts. And standing outside in all weathers as these crosses did, the painting will have had to be regularly renewed.

  Most intriguing, and what adds metaphor as well as mystery, is the role of the Ruthwell Cross in the early history of English literature. Written in Northumbrian runes cut on the lower, narrow sides of the shaft are two extracts from one of the earliest surviving poems composed in English, ‘The Dream of the Rood’. It forms part of a highly sophisticated scheme, in both poetry and sculpture, for reading the whole cross as a kind of text. The poem is based on the notion that the cross on which Christ was crucified had a personality. Here is the second stanza:

  I [lifted up] a powerful king –

  The Lord of Heaven I dared not tilt.

  Men insulted both of us together;

  I was drenched with blood poured from the man’s side.

  The ancient beauty and power of the Ruthwell Cross prompted its destruction: it was smashed in 1642 by hard-line Presbyterian iconoclasts, men who found its imagery offensive because it smacked of popish idolatry. In 1823, the parish minister, Henry Duncan, picked up the pieces that had lain in the grass of the churchyard for almost three centuries, restored them and re-erected the old cross in the manse garden.

  I left the grave of the baby boy, wishing I believed in prayer and its ability to comfort. All I could think to do was wish Hugo’s parents well and hope that like my son and his wife they would be or were blessed with another child. A brother or a sister would be a joy in themselves but also a hand that could reach back into the darkness of the wee one’s death to draw him closer.

  Raised in the traditions of the plain, sombre kirks of Scottish Presbyterianism, I find churches to be depressing places that reek of disapproval and prohibition, and dwell too much on failure and death. To my youthful ear, hymns were mostly joyless dirges and sermons reminders of what a sinful, scruffy and generally unworthy boy I was. In Kelso we had an evangelical believer in hellfire for a minister. Thinking back on interminable Sunday morning services, they were very theatrical in the way they were set up. Perhaps my memory is faulty, and selective, since my attendance quickly moved from occasional to never, but the big moment in our kirk seemed to be the appearance of the minister on stage in his costume of jet-black flowing robes and stiff white collar. Maybe to the accompaniment of something uplifting on the organ (played by his tiny, bespectacled, stick-thin wife) or a sonorous hymn, he would slowly climb the stair to the pulpit, clutching a huge Bible to his chest, his face upturned, chin jutting and a mane of fair hair swept back off his forehead. I prayed, perhaps the only time, for him to trip. The minister reminded me of Finlay Currie, a Scottish actor who played God in several Hollywood epics, but was not nearly so avuncular and benign. When I sat in the Roxy or the Playhouse riveted at the technological magnificence of these overblown films with their soaring scores, I liked that the Almighty had a Scottish accent and that the Romans all seemed to be Americans. I have a memory of John Wayne playing the soldier in attendance at the crucifixion who recognised that ‘Truly, this man was the son of God’, pronounced Gad.

  When our minister reached the pulpit, he slammed the big Bible down on the lectern, opened it at the text for the sermon, and before he began he looked out over the congregation for a few moments, searching for outward signs of sin and noting absentees. And then it began, hellfire, burning pits, endless torment and all. As he worked himself into a righteous passion, the minister’s face, florid at the best of times, began to colour even more as he leaned out over the pulpit to despair of our salvation. When it came to the blessing at the end of the service, I felt we all needed it.

  I have been in English churches several times and know that they are generally much more cheery. But nothing prepared me for the warmth and wonderfully colourful, decorated and detailed interior of St Mary’s, Lindisfarne. It was so welcoming, and a good place to be after having stood at the wee boy’s grave. At the east end of the nave stood a stone font covered with fruit and vegetables, presumably put there for the Harvest Thanksgiving services. Apples, marrows, turnips, bananas, jars of jam, onions, tins of soup, flowers, a jar of curry paste, a packet of flour and all sorts of surprising items were piled on the top and on the base. Around the whole church there was fruit, apples lined up on the altars, and lovely displays of flowers.

  On either side of the nave run rows of polished pews, well cared for, and stained-glass windows fill the church with rays of brightly coloured light. Most striking were two carpets, one laid over the steps up to the Fishermen’s Altar in a side chapel and another at the main altar at the east end. Their designs were lifted from the Lindisfarne Gospels, from what are known as
the carpet pages. Gorgeously coloured and decorated, these are abstract variations on crosses, very geometric and reminiscent of non-figurative Islamic art. According to Bede, some priests in Northumbria used prayer mats and these might have been actual oriental rugs or copies of their designs. The carpet in front of the Fishermen’s Altar is a huge version of the carpet page from the St Luke’s Gospel.

  In high contrast is an impressive sculpture that stands in the south side of the nave. Carved from massive blocks of wood, six monks carry the coffin of St Cuthbert. It commemorates the period after 875 when the monastery is said to have been abandoned at the coming of the much-feared Great Heathen Army, a coalition of Danish and Norse warriors who had invaded England. The monks carried their relics, the coffin of the great saint and possibly even the timbers of Aidan’s original church with them. The sculpture has real power, a study of faith and gritty determination, but its sombre note seemed to me to be discordant in that bright church. On the opposite wall of the nave are reproductions of the carvings made on Cuthbert’s coffin on Lindisfarne soon after 698. They show Christ, the symbols of the gospel writers, Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, a very early representation of the Virgin Mary and Child, the Twelve Apostles and seven archangels. These were all labelled in a curious mixture of Latin script and Northumbrian runes, like the Ruthwell Cross.

  The late seventh-century coffin was a work of great art that showed how Cuthbert and his contemporaries imagined their God, angels, the apostles and God’s mother. Like the crosses, it was almost certainly painted and made even more vivid, even more of a rich focus for devotion. The massive wooden sculpture has power, without doubt, but in my view paint would have enhanced that – because it was clearly important to the monks of the seventh and eighth centuries.

  Two competing perceptions seem to be at work here. We live in a world of high colour, seen every day in all sorts of ways: our houses are painted; so are the objects we buy; the clothes we wear are dyed; we see bright colours in publications, on advertising hoardings, on TV, almost everywhere we turn. In the early medieval period, the world looked very different. Since everything was made from natural materials, buildings, clothes and everyday objects all blended with the colours of the landscape, the tints of spring green, grey skies, autumn yellow and brown, and the blue and green of the sea. Often the only distant sign of a small settlement of wooden houses roofed with rushes were their spirals of smoke from their cooking fires. Vivid colour was rare and usually small in scale, like ripe berries and wildflowers, and I believe that this was part of the reason the gorgeously painted Lindisfarne Gospels were made, the crosses decorated and the images of Cuthbert’s coffin picked out in rich reds, yellows, greens and whatever pigments were thought suitable or were available. Colour made these sacred objects even more distinctive, perhaps even more sacred.

  Partly because surviving fragments of classical temples and their sculpture have come down to us in the neutral colours of stone, we forget that the likes of the Parthenon Frieze was painted and made to look as naturalistic as possible. The sombre look of classical sculpture seems to many in the modern era to be part of their dignity and beauty. But the Greeks, Romans and early medieval churchmen saw things differently. Paint did not look gaudy to them but was a celebration, another way of praising God or the gods. The monochrome wooden sculpture in St Mary’s seemed to me to be a very modern way of honouring the piety of Lindisfarne’s monks and their great saint. I think it would have surprised them.

  When I walked over to the Fishermen’s Altar to look more closely at the carpet made in homage to the carpet page for St Luke’s Gospel, I noticed another contrast with the austere church of my youth, but something Cuthbert would have recognised and warmed to. Below a reproduction of an early medieval Madonna and Child, there was a black wrought-iron table where rows of small candles flickered. Below was a packet of more tea-lights and a box for donations. Under the image of the mother and her baby, I lit candles for Hannah, Grace and Hugo.

  Under a darkening sky and in a breeze that had freshened into a high wind blowing out of the south-west, I walked down to the shore below St Mary’s. The incoming tide had surged over the sands quickly and spindrift blew off the tops of the whitecaps as the sea grew choppy. Below the southern edge of the priory ruins rises the Heugh, a long, flat-topped rock that shelters the old church and monastic buildings, and it is also a vantage point looking out over the waves and the Northumberland coastline. To reach the summit of the Heugh from the western end, there is a steep, rocky staircase put in place by the convulsions of the earth millions of years ago and made accessible by centuries of use. At first it looks like an awkward climb, especially when a strong wind threatens those who stray too near the edge of the cliff, but soon I realised that hundreds of thousands of pairs of feet would show me the safe way. Certain flatter rocks, spaced at the interval of a single step, have been darkened and made smoother by the soles of many, many boots, shoes and sandals.

  The grassy summit of the Heugh is dominated by a former coastguard station with a covered observation deck at the top. By its side stand the ruins of the Lantern Chapel, an enigmatic building that may have had a maritime function, either as a seamark or as a vantage point, or both. Beyond it is a stark, metal-framed mast that is certainly a modern navigational aid used by those wishing to make safe passage into Lindisfarne harbour between the sandbars and rocks. Once the mast is lined up with the tower of St Mary’s Church, then boats should be able to make landfall without mishap. Between the mast and the coastguard station stands the tall cross of a war memorial. But none of these upstanding structures interested me as much as what lay only a few inches under the grass.

  In the summers of 2016 and 2017, archaeologists made dramatic discoveries here. Far from being a rocky whinstone ridge that merely sheltered the monastery founded by Aidan in 635, the Heugh may have been its spiritual focus. Like a vast natural altar overlooking the land and sea, and reaching up to the skies and heaven beyond, it was God’s beacon, a place where a light might shine over the vastness of Creation. Near the war memorial, excavators uncovered the foundations of substantial walls that strongly suggest a high tower, perhaps as high as the modern coastguard station. According to Bede’s moving account, the monks on Lindisfarne saw a beacon lit on the island of Inner Farne in the late winter darkness of 20 March 687. It was a signal that Cuthbert had died. Perhaps an answering light was kindled from the Heugh.

  A year after the first dig, archaeologists opened a second site near the metal-framed mast and, once the soil had been carefully trowelled away, the outline of a small church was revealed. The nature of its construction and the lack of binding mortar strongly suggested that it had been built in the late seventh or early eighth centuries. And it may well be that this stone church was raised on the site of Aidan’s original wooden building. Later documents and traditions spoke of two named churches on early medieval Lindisfarne. St Cuthbert’s of the Sea was a chapel on Hobthrush, a small tidal islet not far offshore from the Heugh and the refuge where Cuthbert began to hanker once more after the peace of a hermetic life. In 2017, it seemed that archaeologists had discovered the second named church, which was known as St Cuthbert’s of the Sky.

  If Aidan chose this high, singular and apparently inhospitable places of winds and storms as the spiritual focus of the community he founded, then his reasons were not perverse, or difficult to understand. In the tradition of the diseartan, places apart from the world, the Heugh seemed doubly blessed, a gift from God. Already cut off each day from the tumult of the world because Lindisfarne is a tidal island, the high rock was further set apart because three sides of it are steep and it is easily accessible only from the east, and there through a narrow path. But more than all of that, it was a place on the edge of yonder, a place where God could see clearly those who prayed to Him and who praised Him. Cleansed by the sea-spray and purified by the incessant wind, this elemental, even harsh, place was a rock of ages but not one where the faithful would hide the
mselves. Fourteen centuries later a child understood what Aidan had understood. A prayer was recently left at St Mary’s Church that read ‘I love you God and Jesus, can you see me?’

  And the rock is cleft. The sense of the Heugh as a natural altar is enhanced by the tradition of the Prayer Holes. On its seaward side, the steep cliffs of whinstone are indented by tiny, shallow caves, little more than niches where a man might press his back against the cold stone, kneel, look out to sea and search the sky for his God. The rhythms of the psalmody, prayer and meditation might have chimed with the shushing of the waves fifty feet below and the soughing of the eternal wind. And on all but the warmest summer days, the flesh will have been mortified and cramped by the cold stone, the spray, the rain and the whip of the breeze and the stinging sand it carried. When night vigils were kept in the Prayer Holes, the pious will have felt themselves on the edge of the world, between it and eternity.

  When his brother monks first brought Cuthbert’s body from Inner Farne to Lindisfarne, they will have been able to approach the Heugh and the monastery below it more closely. In the seventh and eighth centuries, the tides washed further inland than they do now because the waters of the harbour reached much nearer to the ruins of the priory. The eastern end of the Heugh was bounded by the sea on three sides. If Aidan’s church was built on its summit and not, as has long been assumed, where the church of the medieval priory now stands, then Cuthbert’s body will have been placed there, in the most sacred part of the monastery. And that was why I wanted to climb up to the Heugh after the tide shut, to be where he had been, in life and in death, to see what he had seen, to try to discover something of how they saw this place. Then perhaps I could begin to move closer to understanding the peace of Cuthbert.