in the Borders are to be found in the loops of rivers. Jedburgh Abbey rises above a sinuous bend in the Jed Water while Dryburgh, Kelso and Old Melrose are all bounded in part by loops in the course of the Tweed. Such a wide and deep river was a real barrier for millennia, until the bridge-building of the modern age, and it offered a degree of seclusion, a clear division between the temporal and the sacred worlds.
Early Christians were attracted to sites like these because they were impressed and inspired by a group of ascetics known as the Desert Fathers. Perhaps the best known in sixth- and seventh-century Western Europe was St Anthony of Egypt. Copies of his Life, written by St Athanasius of Alexandria, found their way to Britain and Ireland, and scholars believe that both Bede and the anonymous biographer of Cuthbert were able to consult this short but remarkable text. It relates how in the late third century Anthony was raised in a Christian household of some considerable means. When both his parents died, he seems to have had an epiphany. Giving away all of his inherited wealth, a farm of 300 acres and much else of value, he put his younger sister into a convent and embarked on a life of piety and asceticism. After many battles with the Devil and his legions of demons, he sought a solitary life, shutting himself up in a tomb at one point, starving himself and forcing himself into cycles of prayer and vigil. Although Athanasius nowhere states this explicitly, there is a sense threading through the narrative (and others) of the hermit using mortification of the flesh to induce a trance-like state so that he might have out-of-body experiences, something that may have seemed to detach his immortal soul from his worldly flesh. This appears to have been a continuing practice amongst these early saints.
Eventually, Anthony fled to the deserts beyond the fertile valley of the Nile to pursue a life of solitude that might draw him nearer to God. But his fame had spread and, according to Athanasius, ‘cells arose in the mountains, and the desert was colonised by monks who came forth from their own people . . . and he directed them like a father’. And then Anthony retreated even further, to a holy mountain, his ‘inner mountain’, where he lived out the rest of his harsh life. Surviving the persecutions of the Emperor Maximinus II in 311, he died some time later after giving instructions that his body was to be buried in secret so that it could not become a focus for reverence or pilgrimage, something else that would be clearly echoed at the end of Cuthbert’s own life.
The teachings and habits of the Desert Fathers inspired early Irish monks to seek places apart from the world, places of solitude with no worldly distractions. In a Gaelic rendering of deserta, they called their hermitages and communities dìseartan and it is a description that survives in the Scottish place-name of Dysart on the Fife coast, Dyzard in Cornwall, several Dyserths in Wales, and many Diserts in Ireland. Celtic monks let water, both salt and fresh, take the place of the sands of the Egyptian and Judaean deserts, and in the loops of the River Tweed at least two and perhaps four disearts were established in the sixth century as the spirit of Anthony reached across a continent.
Some time around 522, before Columba sailed to Iona in 563, an Irish monk called Modan came to Dryburgh, where he appears to have settled for a time. The son of an Irish sub-king, he has left shadowy traces of his journeys around Scotland. Ardchattan near Loch Etive was once Balmodhan, the settlement of Modan, Kilmodan on the Isle of Bute was his church, St Modan’s High School in Stirling remembers his presence in the Forth Valley, and his relics are said to have been enshrined at St Modan’s Church at Rosneath, across the Gare Loch from Helensburgh. In September 2015, local archaeologists rediscovered St Modan’s Well in the woods above Glendaruel in Argyll and found pebbles of bright quartz around it that had been left by pilgrims who had come to pray there and seek his blessing over many centuries before the Reformation.
At Dryburgh nothing remains of Modan’s presence except for the faint echo of a story. Having reluctantly taken up the office of abbot, he resigned and left the monastery so that he could be free to follow the life of a hermit over in the west of Scotland, near Dumbarton. Given that his relics found their way to Rosneath, it is reasonable to suppose that the Irishman died there. All of these references and locations suggest that the widely travelled monk was a real pre-Columban presence in the Borders, even though no material or documentary record of him can be found.
When Cuthbert rode past the cross by the road and made his way with his servant downhill to Dryburgh, he may have known the story of Modan, but the fact that he moved on to Old Melrose probably means that the early foundation had not survived the saint’s departure.
But I think that Modan’s spirit still flits around the ruined transept, the presbytery beyond it, the cloister and the tumbled walls of the twelfth-century abbey. It was probably built on that site because he had chosen it, dedicated it to God, made it sacred with prayer, and the stories lingered as the centuries passed. And more than that, I believe that like many Irish monks Modan made a link with the pagan past. He will certainly have worn the Druidic tonsure. Monks influenced by the doctrines of the Church of Rome had their hair cut from the crowns of their heads, leaving a fringe around the temples and at the back. This was done in imitation of Christ’s crown of thorns. By contrast, Irish monks and many in Scotland were tonsured across the crowns of their heads, from ear to ear, giving them very high foreheads. Scholars believe that the pagan priests of the first millennium BC, the Druids encountered by the Roman invaders, wore their hair in the same way, their foreheads probably marked by tattoos.
On their missions of conversion of the sixth and seventh centuries, Christian priests and monks were mindful of the advice of Pope Gregory the Great. In the 590s, he ordained that instead of destroying pagan sites and temples ‘they should be sprinkled with holy water’ and used as places of Christian worship. The pagan festivals of Imbolc, Beltane, Lughnasa and Samhuinn should be celebrated not in veneration of idols but for the sake of ‘good fellowship’. This pragmatic approach recognised that for many conversion was not a blinding light, an epiphany or a moment when the whole world changed, but a process whereby beliefs held over millennia gradually shifted. And it was sensible to worship a Christian god at places that were already sacred. They retained their sense of spirituality and also people knew where they were.
For these reasons, I believe that many sites whose history appears to have started only with the coming of missionaries were in fact sacred long before they arrived and that their original sanctity only withered slowly. Like St Anthony, Modan will have been an ascetic, practising mortification of the flesh in many ways. And in itself, I think that this too was a vital link with the beliefs of those who climbed Eildon Hill North four times a year to light fires and celebrate the turning points of the farming year. Unlike the modern Christian God of love and forgiveness, the pantheon of deities who governed the lives and fates of the peoples of Celtic Britain and Ireland, and also those Angles, Saxons and others who sailed the North Sea in search of land, needed to be propitiated. That is, the malignant, aggressive nature of some of these pagan gods had to be neutralised by acts of sacrifice, and often blood needed to be shed. The discovery of what are known as the bog bodies, prehistoric corpses sufficiently well preserved to show the marks of ritual killing, shows that human sacrifices were sometimes required if the pagan gods were to be persuaded not to send thunder, wind and rain to wreck the harvest, or a pestilence to visit the land. Fear was as powerful as faith.
The notion of human sacrifice was not confined to pagan cultures. The early Christian God of the Old Testament asked Abraham to sacrifice Isaac before relenting, but he could also be vengeful, and for many centuries the awful prospect of the fires and pits of Hell, or eternal torment, was very real indeed for most believers. It seems to me that the ascetic monks and hermits were also practising a version of propitiation, a way of pleasing and appeasing God, committing painful acts not only in pursuit of personal purity, piety and the transcendence of the flesh but also undertaken on behalf of communities. For that latter reason, saints were readily venerated, thanked and seen as figures who floated in a sphere between the mortal and the divine and who could intercede with God on behalf of many people. It is thought that the wide proliferation of early saints (each village in Cornwall seems to have its own) was a gradual substitution for local gods.
Like many of his contemporaries, Modan will have embodied
