the divine, a Christian god or any other, or indeed any conventional hope of an afterlife. I believe in an immortality of a different sort: the immortality of continuity, especially continuity in the same place. I will live on through the lives and memories of my children and their children. Even though that will fade in time, perhaps in only three generations, there will be a pile of dusty books somewhere with their forewards, dedications, blurbs and contents where some sense of my life and what I thought can be assembled. If anyone is interested.
With Cuthbert, even though there is no certain way to know his ancestral DNA, I feel that because mine is also Anglian, we have a direct connection. And on that warm and sunny day on the hill, I felt I could hear him on the edge of the wind, murmuring his prayers, looking up at what I was looking at, searching the sky for angels. But he could not have known that he was gazing upon a large part of what would become known as St Cuthbert’s Land, a place where dozens of churches would be dedicated to him and where, for 1,000 years, documents would carry the phrase ‘for St Cuthbert and for God’. And I did not know until that moment my journey had actually begun. I hoped the shepherd boy would lead me down the hill and that I could walk with his shadow to the monastery at Old Melrose.
3
In the Sacred Land
It had been a parched summer, the hottest and longest for more than forty years, with the sun beating down almost every day since the beginning of May. After a six-month winter, with the last snowfall in early April, the landscape was flooded with welcome light and warmth.
Temperatures climbed steadily and reached ninety degrees Fahrenheit in the last week of July. For weeks on end we sweltered in the high seventies and eighties, and virtually no rain fell. But then one evening the heat suddenly became very oppressive, and over the dark heads of the southern hills gunmetal-grey clouds quickly gathered. Far in the distance, thunder rumbled. By 9 p.m. it had grown very dark, and after a few spots it began to rain torrentially. While we ran around the farmhouse closing windows, there was a tremendous crack of thunder directly overhead that made us all flinch instinctively and sheet lightning lit the black sky.
An overnight downpour began, the raindrops huge, and it had a dramatic effect around the farmhouse, especially on the track. In towns and cities, heavy rain falls on hard surfaces – roofs, tarmac and pavements – and is usually taken away by efficient drainage. When it stops, and especially if the sun shines afterwards, it is as though it has never fallen. Here, heavy rain leaves its mark for many days. Much of the rammed earth and pebbles, compacted by vehicle wheels, hooves and feet, was washed away, exposing the stones of the old track, like Roman cobbles. It was worst down at the house, where the velocity of the flow was strongest. I could see that the downpour of the previous night had created a miniature water world, a network of tiny river channels, oxbows, deltas, lakes and dams, something that would delight a child. The bottom track is about a 15% gradient and 120 yards long, and so when the little rivers of rain reached the bend around the gable end of the old house, they had considerable force and carried a lot of pebbles and silt with them. As the camber forced the rainwater to turn, it cut out little river cliffs two or three inches high, as the fine silt piled up. It was like speeded-up land formation, millions of years of geology recreated by one night of torrential rain.
By the time I took the dogs out at 6.30 a.m., the sky had cleared and a watery sun blinked above the woods out to the east. As often after summer rain, the scents of the land were released: the musky smell of wet earth, the bitterness of leaves battered off twigs and branches by the huge raindrops, and the puddles on the tracks filled with the metallic whiff of silt and grit, which was dust only twelve hours before. More, less dramatic, rain was forecast for later in the day, but I decided to risk getting wet and to make a sustained start on the first few steps of my pilgrimage, my journey in Cuthbert’s long shadow. His vision on Brotherstone Hill had deepened the young man’s piety and ultimately persuaded him to go to Old Melrose to seek admission to the community, to become a novice monk.
Since I wanted to walk where he had walked, see something of what he had seen, I needed to work out the route of Cuthbert’s journey from Wrangham to the monastery, what were probably the most fateful, life-changing steps he was ever to take. Always as a historian I have tried to imagine how people thought at the time and what prompted them to act as they did in the past, avoiding the attachment of modern motives and attitudes, thereby not falling into the trap of reading history backwards. Neither Robert Bruce nor Edward II of England knew how events at Bannockburn would fall out and the fact that we do should not colour the telling of the story of the battle. Nothing was inevitable.
So it was with all of the actors in our history. As he made his way between the hedges and looked out over the river valleys of his childhood, Cuthbert did not know where his decision to become a monk would take him, or indeed that the monastery would even admit him. Bede recounts something surprising. Instead of walking, showing some humility in imitation of Christ and the Apostles, Cuthbert rode high on his horse, carrying a spear, and with a servant walking beside him. This detail certainly marks him out as an aristocrat of some degree, but it is difficult to believe that he was armed on account of the countryside between Wrangham and Old Melrose being hostile, these fields and lanes he must have known so well. It seems much more likely he was showing off his status. Lack of self-confidence and uncertainty might have prompted him to think on all manner of possibilities: that his journey was a final taste of freedom, the last time he would look over the fields as a free man before he gave his life to God. And I am sure he wondered how strong his commitment was. Perhaps floating at the back of his mind was the possibility of rejection – either a change of mind on his part or a refusal of the monks to admit him.
This is a pivotal moment in Cuthbert’s story and it is worth quoting the relevant passage at length from Bede’s Life. His characteristically precise and crisp monastic Latin makes a difficult journey sound rather too smooth and inevitable, but Bede’s business was more than historical. He wanted to establish the cult of St Cuthbert and no doubts or blemishes could be admitted in the story of the holy man’s exemplary life. Bede was not so much reading history backwards as making sure it travelled in a straight line and in the right direction:
Meanwhile the reverend servant of the Lord, having forsaken the things of the world, hastens to submit to monastic discipline, since he had been urged by the heavenly vision to seek the joys of eternal bliss and to endure temporal hunger and thirst for the Lord’s sake as one who had been invited to the heavenly feasts. And though he knew that the church at Lindisfarne contained many holy men by whose learning and example he might be instructed, yet learning beforehand of the fame of the sublime virtues of the monk and priest Boisil, he preferred to seek Melrose. And by chance it happened that, having jumped down from his horse on reaching the monastery, and being about to enter the church to pray, he gave both his horse and the spear he was holding to a servant, for he had not yet put off his secular habit.
Ignoring modern roads and remembering that in the seventh century there were no bridges over the Tweed or the Leader (not since the Romans abandoned their great military depot at Trimontium, at the foot of the Eildon Hills), I had pored over large-scale Ordnance Survey maps, the excellent Pathfinder series in particular, looking for traces of disused tracks, and also consulted as many old maps as I could find. In order to reach Old Melrose, I had concluded that Cuthbert had had to go south-east from Wrangham to wade with his horse and servant across the Tweed at the Monksford, an ancient crossing about a mile south of the monastery.
From Brotherstone Farm, an old C road led to the hamlet of Bemersyde on a ridge above the river’s floodplain. And, from there, I reckoned the route turned south and downhill to Dryburgh, where the romantic ruins of a twelfth-century abbey now stand. From there, Cuthbert would have followed the banks of the Tweed north to the ford. That made sense to me, as the most likely path. And when I was checking my maps one last time before packing them in my rucksack, I noticed that a solitary ash tree had been plotted on the Pathfinder by the side of the road, about four or five hundred yards east of Brotherstone Farm. I wondered
