To the Island of Tides

by Alistair Moffat

  Built over the site of where it might have been is a fifteenth-century tower, its function defensive. Much like Lindisfarne Castle, it protected strategic sea-roads during the long war between England and Scotland. The tower forms the north-western side of a small courtyard that also includes a chapel that was dedicated to St Mary and whose ruins were adapted to create a small visitor centre. It was used by women only. Opposite is another chapel that was rebuilt in the fourteenth century and dedicated to St Cuthbert. Inside I found elaborately carved wooden pews that would not have looked out of place in a cathedral and a tripartite stained-glass window with a portrait of Cuthbert holding the head of St Oswald, flanked by St Aidan and St Aethelwold, a later hermit on Inner Farne. There is also a monument to Grace Darling, with some overwrought lines below her name that begin: ‘Oh! That winds and waves could speak of things that their united power called forth from the pure depths of her humanity.’

  On the floor were some carved stones that were medieval in style, but in and around the courtyard (in the places where I was allowed to venture) I could find no sign of Cuthbert.

  Both the Anonymous Life and Bede include a good deal of detail about what the saint built on Inner Farne, probably with help from the brethren on Lindisfarne. Aidan had retreated to the island for short periods when he was bishop and there may already have been a shelter of some kind. Near a well (one of the rangers told me the tower had been built over a well) and on the more sheltered north-eastern shore by the beach was clearly the place to build. Cuthbert appears to have dug down into the soil of the island to form what archaeologists call a ‘grubenhaus’, a building method imported by Anglian and Saxon settlers. To form walls, he piled up uncut stones and God sent driftwood for the rafters of a thatched roof. The tale of the naughty nesting ravens confirms that method of making his cell weathertight.

  Next to his cell, and a well which was discovered in an Old Testament flourish that recalled Moses striking the rock, was his oratory. Bede added more detail about what was a large compound:

  It is a structure almost round in plan, measuring about four or five poles [about eighty feet] from wall to wall; the wall itself on the outside is higher than a man standing upright; but inside he made it much higher by cutting away the living rock, so that the pious inhabitant could see nothing except the sky from his dwelling, thus restraining both the lust of the eyes and of the thoughts and lifting the whole bent of his mind to higher things.

  Sanitation was a surprising consideration for a hermit alone on a sixteen-acre island, but I imagine Cuthbert was fastidious in his habits. Here is a fascinating passage, again from Bede, with some wonderfully restrained language about the practicalities of the solitary life:

  The very sea, I say, was ready to do service to the servant of Christ when he needed it. For he was intending to build a hut in his monastery, very small but suited to his daily needs; it was to be on the seaward side where the hollowing out of the rock by the washings of continual tides had made a very deep and wide gap; flooring had to be placed under the hut, and this had to be twelve feet long so as to fit the width of the gap. So he asked the brethren, who had come to visit him, that when they were returning, they would bring with them some timber twelve feet long, to make a flooring for this little house.

  But the brethren forgot and instead the required timber for the toilet was supplied by driftwood that happened to be exactly twelve feet in length and fitted the place where the tides would flush the loo.

  Cuthbert’s cell and oratory have almost certainly been built over by the later chapel and tower, but the foundations of his guesthouse for visitors may have been used to build a fisherman’s hut by the jetty. It stands at some distance from the round compound. Instead of poking around the courtyard, I decided to walk around the little island. Perhaps a sense of Cuthbert’s presence might be found elsewhere.

  St Bartholomew of Farne lived on Inner Farne for forty-two years, leading an extremely ascetic life in the second half of the twelfth century. He wore skins, slept on rocks, lived on bread he made from corn he grew on the island and milk from a cow, as well as fish he caught. Bartholomew’s habit was to stride around the island singing psalms in a ringing voice. In another sense, he led a sheltered life. When a woman strayed from St Mary’s Chapel into St Cuthbert’s, the horrified hermit is said to have fainted. Famous and much admired, he was visited by wealthy people who probably made gifts to the church and sought his blessing. When Bartholomew died in 1193, he was buried on the island, but I could find no sign of his tomb. Or anything else that took Inner Farne’s story further back than the later Middle Ages.

  To protect the nesting birds, visitors are bound to follow the roped-off boardwalk paths around Inner Farne. What I had at first thought to be rabbit holes were of course puffin burrows and in the surprisingly deep soil there were hundreds, maybe thousands. I walked up to the highest point of the island, where a lighthouse had been built in the nineteenth century, and was struck by how close it is to Bamburgh Castle. The Northumbrian kings who looked out to sea could not miss Inner Farne, the place where, according to the Anonymous Life, Cuthbert did battle with evil, and ‘a place where, before this, almost no one could remain alone for any length of time on account of the various illusions caused by devils’. The biblical reference would have been unmistakable. In the Gospel of Luke, a beggar covered in sores called Lazarus lay at the gate of a ‘rich man dressed in purple and fine linen’ and lived off the crumbs from his table.

  Beyond the lighthouse was a sheer drop to the sea, and the stacks I had seen from the boat were very dramatic. I wondered if there were prayer holes in the cliff, like those on the Heugh on Lindisfarne. Amongst the shelved rocks where I stood was a beautifully formed natural basin where rainwater had gathered, similar to what I had seen on top of Cuddy’s Cave. Swimming offshore were two eider ducks, known locally as Cuddy’s Ducks. When he lived on Inner Farne, the saint insisted that the birds not be attacked or their eggs taken. This very early conservation initiative was something the young rangers did know about the hermit.

  Neither the Anonymous Life nor Bede’s note the date when Cuthbert laid down the cares of office on Lindisfarne and came first to live alone on the island, but his last period of only a few months is well documented. After Christmas 686, and despite what seems to have been a worsening, debilitating illness, Cuthbert sailed the winter seas to Inner Farne. His trust in God must have been absolute. In the place where he had prayed, sung psalms and fought devils, he wanted to meet his Maker. From Bede’s account, it appears that he was often not alone. In the last week of his life, Herefrith, who became abbot of Lindisfarne, came with other brethren and much of what Bede wrote is his verbatim recollection. As Cuthbert’s condition deteriorated and ‘the stress of his sickness took from him the power of speech’, he retreated to his oratory. Herefrith remembered:

  I entered in to him about the ninth hour of the day and I found him lying in a corner of his oratory, opposite to the altar; so I sat down by him. He did not say much because the weight of his affliction had lessened the power of speech.

  After Cuthbert had ‘passed a quiet day in the expectation of future bliss’, his condition worsened once more. On the night of 20 March 687, he died:

  Without delay, one of them [the brethren] ran out and lit two torches: and holding one in each hand he went on to some higher ground to show the brethren who were in the Lindisfarne monastery that his holy soul had gone with the Lord: for this was the sign they had agreed amongst themselves to notify his most holy death.

  When the watcher on the Heugh, five miles to the north, saw the pinpricks of flaring torchlight on Inner Farne, he may have lit an answering beacon. Cuthbert had told Herefrith that he wished to be buried on Inner Farne, ‘where, to some small extent, I have fought my fight for the Lord, where I desire to finish my course, and where I hope I shall be raised up to receive the crown of righteousness from the righteous Judge’. He was also anxious about pilgrimage, showing a keen awarene
ss of how cults develop and about ‘the influx of fugitives and guilty men of every sort’ to Lindisfarne. Eventually Herefrith managed to persuade him to allow his body to be taken back to the monastery. The earlier Anonymous Life makes no mention of Cuthbert’s reluctance, whereas Bede spends a page rehearsing the discussion and in it there is a powerful sense of reading history backwards. By the time he wrote his account, the cult of Cuthbert had flowered, the Lindisfarne Gospels were complete in all their glory, and no doubt many pilgrims were making their way to his tomb and contributing gifts to the monastery and the church in general. It probably appeared seemly to Bede for Cuthbert to have shown reluctance to accept in death the fame he feared in life.

  Here is the succinct passage from the Anonymous Life on the day it became clear that Cuthbert had been elevated to sainthood:

  After eleven years, through the prompting and instruction of the Holy Spirit, after a council had been held by the elders and licence had been given by the holy Bishop Eadberht, the most faithful men of the whole congregation decided to raise the relics of the bones of the holy Bishop Cuthbert from his sepulchre. And, on first opening the sepulchre, they found a thing marvellous to relate, namely that the whole body was as undecayed as when they had buried it eleven years before. The skin had not decayed nor grown old, nor the sinews become dry, making the body tautly stretched and stiff; but the limbs lay at rest with all the appearance of life and were still moveable at the joints. For his neck and knees were those of a living man; and when they lifted him from the tomb, they could bend him as they wished. None of his vestments and footwear which touched the flesh of his body was worn away. They unwound the headcloth in which his head was wrapped and found that it kept all the beauty of its first whiteness; and the new shoes, with which he was shod, are preserved in our church over against the relics, for a testimony, up to this present day.

  To my eye, Inner Farne is not beautiful or indeed atmospheric, like Lindisfarne. My time on the island was brief and the day sunny and calm, but no spirits seemed to inhabit it, nor any devils. Even though I was the sole visitor and was not distracted, I found the rock to be a historical blank and gained no insight from walking where Cuthbert had walked. There was nothing there except the documented bleakness of the hermit’s weary death and the management of his journey to sainthood. In both literal and metaphorical terms, even the account of his disinterment is a story of manipulation. The image of the Lindisfarne monks bending his lifeless body, like a floppy doll, is not attractive, even though it must be apocryphal.

  I waited on the edge of the little beach by the jetty for the boat to collect me and thought about how Cuthbert had met his end. In Bede’s account, it reads like a recital of miseries, many of them self-inflicted. When he resigned his bishopric, or was pushed out, Cuthbert seems to have known he was very ill and, in an era without much medical succour, was probably suffering a good deal of pain. His faith and trust in God took him to Inner Farne because that was where he had fought the good fight hardest and where it would be good to die. But for a sick man lying on a rock scoured by the icy winter winds in the long nights of January and February, it was a time of extreme privation, the worst pain he had ever endured. At first I found it very difficult to discern any lessons or examples in all of that misery.

  When at last the boat arrived and I clambered aboard with more helping hands, the trip back to Seahouses seemed to take forever. As I looked over my shoulder at Inner Farne, I realised that Cuthbert returned there to take up the hermetic life because he wanted to face death alone. And he was right to do that. We all face death alone; no one goes with us into the darkness. But it was the suffering that upset me, the painful conclusion of an exemplary life. On my journey from Brotherstone Hill and Old Melrose, and through my attempts to understand why he did what he did, I had felt that sometimes I walked beside Cuthbert, and I found the story of his death vexed me. What I seek is not something philosophically complex. I am no philosopher. I want to be at peace with myself when I come to the moment of death and I hope that illness will not make it painful. For all his prayer and all his evident goodness, Cuthbert seemed to me to meet death with little peace. Often unable to speak, having collapsed, enduring the bitterness of winter and all the time negotiating with Herefrith about where he might be buried, Cuthbert’s death appeared to be more of a release than a triumphant ascent to heaven in the arms of angels.

  Epilogue

  Godless

  The first frosts of winter had come. Late home from Edinburgh the night before, I looked up at an open sky. Orion with his belt, sword and square shoulders stood guard in the east, the Plough was upended above the old sycamores in the Top Wood and the Milky Way flowed its neck-craning course across the black of the heavens. Quiet, fast asleep, the farmhouse, stableyard and the home paddock were bright with starlight. When I was out with the dogs in the early morning, I felt a sharp, headachey cold in the air and in the half-light before dawn the fields were white. Later I looked at the gauge on the woodstore: minus seven.

  By the time Maidie and I had walked up the track, there was enough light to make the stars fade to blue, even though the sun had yet to breast Greenhill Heights. Over in the west, I saw the sheep waiting patiently on Howden Hill to warm themselves in the first rays. The rays were already shining on the hills above the Ettrick Valley, making them glow pale purple in the windless morning. The long, hot summer had laden the apple trees and the cherries with abundance. On one small tree I lost count of the number of apples after 200. Most will drop unused as windfall, a waste. The frost had made the cherries glacé, but the birds will savour their goodness nonetheless. Even if the winter begins harshly, there will be plenty of berries, cherries and apples for them, but in January the robins will become friendly, hopping close in the stableyard, daring to dart in and out of the feed-room in search of scraps.

  When Maidie and I reached the Windygates, the highest point of the track, cracking the crusts of ice in the puddles, the sun came quickly, just as it had over the grey horizon of the North Sea beyond Lindisfarne. It was magical. The birches still had most of their tiny, filigree leaves, the sycamores were not yet bare, and the larches were pale yellow, waiting for a stiff breeze to take their needles. When the sun came, the trees glowed golden, the white film of frost around them evaporated and the land came alive. Many years ago, I visited an old priest on South Uist in the late autumn and Father Angus told me how he felt the seasons shift. When he was a boy growing up in the islands, he put away his boots in the spring and walked and ran barefoot. ‘I could feel the land waking under my feet, the soil warming and the light returning. And at the end of autumn, I could feel it beginning to die again.’

  Between returning from Inner Farne and writing this, all of my resolutions and musings on how to face death suddenly came into sharp focus with some blunt possibilities. After several weeks of developing symptoms that I thought were nothing much, maybe a passing infection, I went to see a doctor, anxious about prostate cancer. It is becoming very common, with nearly 50,000 diagnoses in Britain each year and growing. I gave the doctor a sample, he tested it immediately, and, saying he had found some blood, he set up more tests and an appointment with a specialist at the local hospital. I suspected his speed and efficiency were precautionary rather than something to be alarmed about. My blood test would tell. If I had prostate cancer, the degree of it, what is known as a tumour marker, would show up. I had to wait six days for the result, partly because the laboratory was closed over the weekend.

  During that anxious time, I forced myself not to ignore, not dismiss this as an anxiety about something that had not happened and let it lurk at the back of my mind. And equally, not to be melodramatic. I rehearsed as calmly as I could what I would say if the result came back positive, confirming that I had cancer. Most important would be the conversations with Lindsay and my children. By that time, I hoped I would know something about how advanced any cancer was by the marker rating and I spent time doing what friends advise y
ou not to do, researching on the internet. I thought it best to confront this possibility squarely and the best way to do that was with good information.

  Over those days of waiting, I thought a great deal about my time on Lindisfarne and my journey in Cuthbert’s shadow. It occurred to me that on Inner Farne he was tired of dying, impatient to be away, to join his God. All of the weary negotiations with Herefrith ended when, it seemed to me, Cuthbert gave up and gave in. It was a sad process I had seen for myself. After my father died on that snowy evening in February 1986, my mum gradually began to withdraw. Even though she complained, particularly to my sister Barbara, about looking after my dad when he was disabled by strokes, she found life without him difficult. Although she loved her grandchildren and her children, I think she felt her life had little purpose, and when she died it was because she had had enough. I wondered if I would grow tired of dying, especially if the cancer was advanced. And, of course, these dark thoughts were intermittently blown away by sunlit gusts of optimism. The doctor’s haste was nothing more than very welcome efficiency, the NHS working well. Of course it was.

  While it took place after days of shivering misery on Inner Farne, Cuthbert’s departure and his negotiations with Herefrith were not all negative. He was doing something sensible: thinking about his death and its consequences for others, planning, considering his legacy. It is something we should all do, but preferably not in the shadow of imminent death. If my blood test came back with a high marker, meaning the cancer had spread, then I too would have to make some decisions, but I decided to proceed slowly, one step at a time. Sometimes I find life wearying, but at sixty-eight I was not ready to go, if the news from the laboratory turned out to be bad. It might not be, but I could not ignore other possibilities.