Once across the seaweed-covered rocks and the sands of the channel between Hobthrush and Lindisfarne, I decided I needed to be in the company of people, just be with them and not talk. Another visit to Pilgrims Coffee House and its predatory sparrows seemed like a good idea. With a fruit scone the size of a side-plate, I went out into the garden but, the tide not being shut, all of the tables were taken. Then a couple got up and I joined an Australian lady at a small table. Despite my resolution to be quiet, I asked if she had been to the island before. When she surprised me by saying she came every eighteen months or so, I asked what brought her halfway across the world to this place. She smiled: ‘This is where I keep my soul.’ And when I asked what she did on Lindisfarne: ‘Walk. I just walk every day around the island.’
By the time I had fought off the sparrows and eaten my scone, the tide was shutting and I decided to emulate this lady’s habits. Fortified and under a bright sun, I made my way out of the village and around the bay towards the castle. Below it stand a series of large limekilns, places where limestone was burned at very high temperatures to produce fertiliser and a key ingredient for builders’ mortar. Leading north along the eastern shore of the island is an old waggonway that supplied the kilns. Flat and high above the stony beach, it made for easy walking. Not far from the castle, the tides had pushed up a long ridge of stones and on it were a series of small cairns, like the crenellations of a castle rampart. Closer-up, they were clearly carefully made and not like cairns at all. Some had much larger stones balanced on smaller ones, a little like the pillar at St Cuthbert’s Cave. Others had small stone circles around them, and still more were artistically shaped, almost sculptural, decorative. Several had collapsed. I suspect they have a simple function: people who visit want to leave a mark on this sacred landscape, like the plaques on the benches. I liked them.
When the waggonway climbed a little, I could see that the wind was driving spectacular breakers as the tide flooded in. Sandbanks were pushing some of them in different directions, causing them to collide before they crashed onshore. This made surging, sideways runs of waves that seemed to suddenly die away. It was hypnotic.
Many years ago, I saw the same phenomenon in Uig Bay on the Atlantic shore of the Isle of Lewis in the Outer Hebrides. I had gone to see the ruined township of Carnais, one of the many that had been abandoned during the dark times of the Clearances, the forced evictions of crofters that took place in the nineteenth century. What brought me to this heart-breakingly beautiful place was a song. ‘An Ataireachd Ard’ is a moving, soaring and deeply affecting lament. It speaks of the suffering and loss of whole communities and their way of life, but also the wash of history across the landscape. It could as easily have been written on Lindisfarne as on the Isle of Lewis.
On a summer afternoon in the 1890s, Donald MacIver hitched up his pony and trap for a journey back into the past. A teacher at the school at Breascleit, he had received a letter from Canada, from his uncle, Domhnall Ban Crosd. Forty and more years before, he and his family had been cleared off the land at Carnais and herded on to the emigrant ships bound for North America. But before he died, Domhnall Ban wanted to see his home-place once more. Many who were forced into exile suffered something more than homesickness; the Gaelic word is ionndrain and it means something like ‘a missing piece’, perhaps a part of the soul that had been left behind on the windy shores of the Hebrides. As his nephew clicked his pony up the track at Miabhig, the vast panorama of the mighty Atlantic opened before them and the pale gold of the sands of Uig Bay glowed in the summer sunshine.
Domhnall Ban’s nickname of ‘Crosd’ is a Gaelic version of the English word ‘cross’ or ‘grumpy’, and as he saw again a place he had beheld only in his dreams the old man’s stern, stone face was set, betraying no emotion. But when at last they rounded the bay and came to Carnais, the place where he had been born and raised in the body warmth of an interdependent crofting community, there was nothing to see but ruins, only a few courses of tumbled masonry where houses had once been. There was little left of the busy, working landscape where families had toiled, lived and died. At last Domhnall Ban’s face crumpled and he wept for the loss of his home, the image he had held in his thoughts across all of the years of exile in Canada, and he was desolate at the waste. ‘Chan eil nith an seo mar a bha e, ach an ataireachd na mara,’ he said to his nephew: ‘There is nothing here now as it was, except for the surge of the sea.’
Much moved by the memory of the old man’s tears, Donald MacIver wrote his great lyric about loss, change and the tides of history:
An ataireachd bhuan
Cluinn fuaim na h-ataireachd ard
Tha torunn a’chuain
Mar chualas leamsa nam phaisd
Gun mhuthadh, gun truas
A’ sluaisreadh gainneimh na tragh’d
An ataireachd bhuan
Cluinn fuaim na h-ataireachd ard.
The ceaseless surge
Listen to the high surge of the sea
The thunder of the ocean
As I heard it when I was a child
Without change, without pity
Breaking on the sands of the beach
The ceaseless surge
Listen to the surge of the sea.
As I walked along the waggonway watching the crash of the waves, the rhythm of Donald MacIver’s words in my head, I realised that Cuthbert saw exactly what I saw and heard the eternal thunder of the ocean exactly as I heard it. Much moved by that continuity, at last I began to confront my own history. Though I hoped that the sadness that engulfed Domhnall Ban Crosd towards the end of his life was not waiting for me.
When I reached Emmanuel Head, a vast white obelisk on the north-east corner of the island that acts like a daytime lighthouse, keeping shipping from setting a course too close to the reefs and sandbars that lie offshore, I found a bench and sat down to stare at the waves.
Resentments fade and anger cools as the years race past, and when I look back at my time in television, the failures, problems and betrayals seemed to have diminished with distance. In that liminal time in the early morning, in the grey wastes between waking and sleeping, thoughts of what happened twenty years ago do not often drift into my head. More recent history does, however, take up too much emotional energy and since I probably don’t have twenty years left to allow the pain of it to pale, it occurred to me on that blowy afternoon that I should try to come to a settlement sooner rather than later.
Sitting on a bench, looking out to sea on Cuthbert’s island, I felt that by allowing those who had hurt and attacked me to intrude, I was somehow polluting this place of peace. But in truth I needed to deal with this. In St Mary’s Church, only a few hours before I sat down, I had heard the murmur of the Lord’s Prayer, the words so familiar that I didn’t think about them. One line came floating in the clear air at Emmanuel Head and that was ‘forgive those who sin against us’. I knew that was what I had to do – forgive these people. I knew I had to do that if these painful episodes were to be banished to the margins, but I had no idea how.
The shadow of the white obelisk at Emmanuel Head was beginning to reach across the sea as the westering sun slid behind it and I decided to walk back through the evening to the village. I noticed that, like most benches, there was a metal plaque on the back of this one. It commemorated Gisela Elfriede Hall (née Rohde) and under her name was an inscription in German: ‘Hier war ich immer glucklich und zufrieden’ (‘Here I was always happy and content’). Gisela’s surname suggested that she had married a British national and perhaps she came often to the island. In any case, the inscription encouraged me to think that Lindisfarne might indeed calm and console me, if I let it. It also reminded me not to waste time. Gisela died in 2011, only a few days short of her sixty-eighth birthday. She was younger than I am now.
On the waggonway, I had been startled by some very striking and large wickerwork sculptures of two adult ducks and their ducklings set in the marram grass by the beach. For a moment I w
as not sure if they were animate or not. As I turned inland from Emmanuel Head, I came across more of these playful works of art: a gigantic fly anchored to a sign, a huge owl perched on a post, and a tall broadleaved plant that looked tropical attached to a fence.
I was making my way to another track that led down the centre of the island past St Coombs Farm and on into the village. These are called lonnen, a variation on the Scots word ‘loaning’, a green track, usually between fields. It was the only place with significant tree cover and my walk was well shaded.
I had seen a black horse grazing amongst a flock of very well-covered sheep and, as I passed its field gate, a woman waited. She had caught up the horse in a halter and did not want me to walk behind it. She was worried it might spook, or plant its feet and refuse to move. I walked ahead and we talked briefly before she turned her horse out in a paddock with a field shelter. Only about one hundred and forty people now live on the island, she said, since so many houses in the village had become holiday lets and there were only two children attending the school, one of them part time. When I told her I had been walking, she smiled and said that was how she found peace, just by walking and sometimes riding along the island paths.
A dusty light was fading by the time I reached my hotel. After shuffling sideways into the shower and enjoying more Holy Island gin, I walked to the Ship for another Reading Tea. The restaurant being fully booked, I ate at a table in the bar.
After a day of sun, clear skies made it a moonless night, and even though I was tired I took myself up to the Heugh to look out over the sea. The high winds of the morning had softened to a breeze blowing out of the south and the starlight shimmered over the water. There was enough light to see the castle in silhouette; the lighthouse on the Farne Islands seemed far out to sea and very brightly lit, and Bamburgh Castle looked warm and welcoming.
Well wrapped and with many calories from the Ship Inn supplying central heating, I found myself going over the events of the day. There seemed to have been many – a long time had passed since I sat on the Heugh at dawn and went to communion at St Mary’s. I had read and heard that people loved this island with a quiet passion and I was beginning to understand rather than intuit why and how. They walked, beyond the village and the press of visitors – that was where the essence of this place was to be found, where peace could descend. Cuthbert walked and sang psalms or recited prayers as he passed the crash of the waves or heard the cry of seabirds. Even though the priory ruins, St Mary’s, the castle and the other attractions in the village supply the images that make up Lindisfarne’s famous iconography, it was beyond these that some sense of its secrets could be discovered. And that was what I would do for most of the rest of my stay – walk.
In the weeks before I crossed the causeway, I had read about and become interested in religious visions, not because I imagined for a moment that I might have one on Lindisfarne, but because they seemed to occur in Cuthbert’s time. I wondered if these leathery old saints, fasting and up to their necks in freezing water, had had hallucinations and reckoned them to be visions, revelations of the sort Drythelm recounted. These were understood as events, blinding flashes or dramatic turning points that could change lives and the perceptions of those who listened. One of the most famous visions of the early modern period came to an entirely rational, brilliant mathematician. Blaise Pascal invented the mechanical calculator and made important discoveries in geometry and arithmetic, yet in 1654 he had a profound religious experience that changed his life. It was so central that he wrote this on a small piece of paper:
FIRE. God of Abraham, God of Isaac, God of Jacob, not of the philosophers and scholars. Certainty. Certainty. Feeling. Joy. Peace.
So that it would always be with him, Pascal had the paper sewn into the lining of his coat. And if he changed his coat, this brief record of what he experienced was transferred. After he had seen God and felt joy and peace, the mathematician wrote Pensées, his Thoughts, and before I came to the island I read some of this beautifully written text. The sincerity of his belief and the certainty of what he had seen were unmistakable. And it was a moment after which everything was different, something I knew I was very unlikely to experience. Instead, I suspected my own search for peace would be a process, one that might take time. But having no belief in God or any other agency, it is what I think that matters, and I was now sure that I had to do it and I reckoned I had made a start.
The wind had dropped, but when I walked through the darkened village to my hotel I was certain I could hear it howl once more. This strange, chilling sound seemed to come from the west, the sands beyond the island.
10
Duneland
It was an open sky as I scurried down the Marygate to the harbour. Dawn would come up clean and clear, and I wanted to see the sun rise over the North Sea horizon. No clouds would occlude it and, seen from the castle, the highest point of the island, I hoped the coming of the morning would look spectacular. But I was late, not out of the hotel until 6.45 a.m. and sunrise was due at 7.01 a.m. Like an early morning jogger, I trotted through the half-light as quickly as my creaking knees would allow and climbed the cobbled path to the castle entrance and the terrace beside it. The moment I stopped, it started.
Every time I have seen a sea sunrise, the drama of it has been breathtaking. At first the glinting edge of the fiery disc is just discernible and it is possible to look directly at it without being dazzled. And then it happens with a speed that always surprises me. When the top third of the sun showed, it began to light the battlements above me and then it flowed down to warm me on the high terrace. I looked behind and the long shadow of the castle reached as far as the towers of the priory and the roofs of the village below it, perhaps three-quarters of a mile away. All of the colours of the land began to glow: the green of the fields, the russet of the autumn trees that line the lonnen, the brilliant white dots of grazing sheep.
So that I could watch the sea change colour from a cold grey to blue-green, I left the terrace to climb up to Little Beblowe, an outcrop directly to the east of the castle. A rabbit scuttered in front of me, startled to see movement so early, and when I had scrambled to the summit, the sea and the land seemed to come alive. On the far horizon, the hull of a tanker glinted; to the south, the ramparts of Bamburgh were warmed; on the mainland, the low sun lit the silent stream of traffic on the A1. Darkness had fled, the light had come and the day could begin. A random thought swam into my head. How sad it was that Lucifer, the Bringer of Light, Son of Morning, had fallen and become the symbol of evil. Mornings like this lift the heart high.
On my way back to the village to light candles at St Mary’s, the scent of a summer just passed filled the air. On a patch of lush grass by the harbour road, an old man was quartering the ground on a ride-on mower, making contrasting light and dark green stripes with the roller behind the blades. Without stopping, he lifted a hand in greeting and I walked up the Marygate, its houses basking in the butter-coloured sunlight. The first frosts would come soon enough and the trees were already in the yellow leaf.
The line of the Marygate is thought to run along the northern edge of the monastic precinct, the ditch and bank that marked off the most sacred ground. I had become curious about routes around the island, the clear link between Cuthbert’s habit of walking while he sang and prayed and those pilgrims who came now. The village and the medieval priory have obliterated the precinct, but there are fascinating survivals that offer a partial sense of what it was like and how it was seen. No crosses like those at Ruthwell and Bewcastle survive from Lindisfarne; there is only the massive socket between St Mary’s and the priory and what is known as the Petting Stone. This sits to the left of the path leading to St Mary’s and was the base of a monumental cross. When a rare wedding takes place in the church, the bride takes part in a fertility rite as she jumps over the stone, helped by the two oldest fishermen on the island. Another is tucked away in a corner of the medieval ruins. It has carvings that date to the eigh
th or ninth centuries and was recovered only when the central tower fell down in the 1820s. The medieval builders had split the old cross socket in two and used it as foundations for the tower. It seemed to me a pity that more was not made of the two sockets: they are the sole direct survivals in situ from the original monastery.
But in the priory museum there is an excellent display of other survivals, what the curators call ‘name stones’. They looked to me to like small tombstones. Fourteen have been found around the priory and the style of carving suggests that they were made between about 650 and 750. Cuthbert would have seen them and perhaps known some of those who were commemorated. The stones were brightly coloured with reds, greens and black painted over a white background and the lettering of the names and the style of the crosses carved on all of them definitely relate to the Lindisfarne Gospels. What made these stones come alive for me were the names inscribed on them. Beannah, Osgyth, Ethelhard, Aedberecht, Audlac and the others may have been monks or individuals privileged or sufficiently wealthy to be granted burial inside the monastic precinct. It is a very early example of a cultural habit that persisted into the modern period, the wish to be buried in holy ground, something seen at Dryburgh Abbey with the tombs of Sir Walter Scott and Field Marshall Earl Haig.
To the Island of Tides Page 22
