thinking I might have lost the direction of the ford. Even though the maps all showed it running the shortest distance, directly from bank to opposite bank, perhaps it crossed on the diagonal? No. Not that way either. The far channel seemed deep there too. My baptism into the world of Cuthbert was baulked by a real obstacle.
After more splashing around, almost capsizing again after slipping on some big rounded stones, I decided to go back, to give up, very reluctantly. Without really articulating it beforehand (all I wanted to do was follow Cuthbert as closely as possible), I suppose I saw the wading of the river as a form of informal baptism into his world. But like bridges, fords need to be maintained. The spates of centuries of winters had probably shifted what shallow footing there had been, as the great river reclaimed its natural course. In winter, crossing must have been impossible, as rain and snow swelled the current. Boats would have been the only option. For me there was nothing for it but to be sensible, wade back to the bank to dry off, put my jeans, socks and boots back on, and retrace my steps back to the Temple of the Muses and the footbridge below it.
I had barely begun this journey with Cuthbert but had already seen several reverses and false starts. But in one sense at least I felt I had been close to him. On the road from Brotherstone, I had met no one. On a sunny July morning I had enjoyed a few hours of real peace as I moved through the summer landscape, something I would come to think of as the peace of Cuthbert.
Recently refurbished, the footbridge looked splendid. The views up and downstream revealed broad areas of white, dried-out river boulders and stones below the overgrown banks, but even though the water was low the channel under the bridge seemed deep.
After I had crossed, I came upon a small car park. Signs told me this was a section of St Cuthbert’s Way. Beginning at Melrose Abbey, then climbing the saddle between Eildon Hill North and Eildon Mid Hill, descending to Newtown St Boswells before going on to the village of Bowden, it is not a way Cuthbert would ever have come. But it does pass some beautiful views and, having climbed the long steps to the bank above the river, I came across a steady stream of walkers who were enjoying it, stopping often to take photographs on their phones. One bench had been set up to look north, and of course Eildon Hill North dominated the landscape.
After a long climb up a winding wooden stair, the path snaked through dense woodland above the river and footbridges had been built to cross the deeper wooded deans. After about half a mile, I saw that a recent gale labelled Storm Hector (why has this childish American habit of anthropomorphising destructive weather been adopted?) had blown down a big ash tree and it had landed squarely on a bench, pulverising it. There seemed to be a message there. The path occasionally forked and I found myself following it away from the river. Around a corner, I was suddenly assailed by the roar of traffic above me, a bridge carrying the trucks and cars of the busy A68. This riverside woodland suddenly felt like an underworld, parts of a palimpsest, layers below the thunder of the twenty-first century. A helicopter flew low, unseen, and it seemed to make the trees vibrate. The peace of Cuthbert was shattered and once more I decided to retrace my steps to look for a path by the riverbank.
When at last I emerged from the green shade of the woodland, I found I had been going not so much in circles but back and forth, so that I had only walked half a mile in half an hour, poor progress. The path by the Tweed had almost been overwhelmed by the broad leaves of hogweed, and when I eventually reached the bank opposite the ford it was very difficult to get close to the water to see how deep it was. I met a fisherman in chest-high waders who told me I had been wise to turn back. Not only was there no one about if I had got into difficulties, I had been standing on the edge of a salmon pool he had only ever thought it safe to fish from the bank or from the place where I had been splashing around in the shallows of the far side.
Some wooden signs and two inexplicable red and blue arrows suggested at least three directions of travel, but I wanted to stay in sight of the Tweed. Someone had taken the trouble to strim the long grass and nettles to open a track and I assumed that it led to Old Melrose. But after a few hundred yards it simply stopped dead on the edge of another deep pool. By this time, I could see the high bank where the river had turned to make its loop around Old Melrose. The site of the old monastery was close and after several reverses and many steps retraced, I did not want to turn back yet again and look for another path. The problem was the alternative – a climb up a high bank to my left. The map showed the woods running out into fields at the top; somewhere up there a track might be found.
There seemed to be plenty of saplings growing out of the slope, most of them as thick as my arm, and for about twenty feet I made good and careful progress. But then I had to swing across the face of the bank for a good handhold on a sapling that would lead me up what looked an easier route. But when I slipped on the damp, peaty earth I cannoned heavily into the little tree, hitting it with my chest. Unfortunately a hard plastic buckle on my rucksack was between me and the tree and I heard the unmistakable click of a rib snapping.
I knew that sound and what it felt like. Some years ago, when I had some money, I bought myself a splendid dapple-grey gelding. Standing almost seventeen hands, Sooty (daft name, I know, but he had black legs) could easily carry me and we enjoyed some memorable hacks in the countryside around our farm, and with a professional rider aboard he won the Novice Working Hunter class at the Ettrick and Yarrow Show. But one morning, in the arena next to the stables, I rode him without stirrups. Absolutely daft for such a poor rider. Instinctively I held on with my legs, squeezing him around the girth and, well schooled as he was, that sent him off into an abrupt canter and me flying out the side door. I fell hard and broke several ribs on my right-hand side. Exactly where the plastic buckle, me and the tree had collided. It hurt, but not so badly that I couldn’t make it to the top of the bank, and from there to the plateau of the river peninsula of Old Melrose. I wondered if repeated and inadvertent mortification of the flesh ranked alongside the self-inflicted torment practised by the monks who had crossed the ford and trodden the path to the diseart thirteen or more centuries before I made my undignified entrance.
Even more than the loop of the Tweed at Dryburgh, the river almost makes the peninsula an island at Old Melrose. Close to where I had scrambled up to the top of the bank, its course pinches tight, not quite joining, before it is pushed around 280 degrees by a massive river cliff gouged out by the glaciers of the last ice age. Near-vertical in places, it towers above the site of the monastery and adds to a powerful sense of enclosure. The topography of Old Melrose is surprising. Much of it is a high plateau that looks down on the river and affords a long southern vista to Monksford and Dryburgh; immediately below it is the fringe of a broad, grassy floodplain. Incongruously, there was a large canvas tipi pitched on it the day I arrived.
Now heavily wooded, the peninsula is part of a well-managed estate dominated by Old Melrose House. It stands on the highest point of the plateau, close to where the early medieval chapel of St Cuthbert was built, and around it are grass parks grazed by sheep and one or two horses. The buildings of the old dairy farm are bounded by woods and bright barley fields, early to ripen in this hot and sunny summer. Most of its byres are now converted into a tea room, a bookshop and an antiques shop. On the warm afternoon when I mortified one of my ribs, the discomfort was much eased by this beautiful, sylvan scene, a peaceful place that gave no hint of its ancient, austere existence.
4
Soul-Friends
Names tell stories, especially place-names, and sometimes they even move, taking their history with them. Old Melrose is so called because a New Melrose came into being, a consequence of dynastic politics. Scotland’s most modernising medieval king, a man who made a decisive break with the Celtic, Gaelic-speaking past, was David I. Raised at the court of the Norman-French Henry I, he was the sixth son of Malcolm III Canmore and his prospects of succeeding to the throne of Scotland were unlikely. But he had talent, and fortune fell out happily for him. Fluent in French, schooled in Western European culture and steeped in the dynamics of politics, he was, as contemporary writers consistently assert, a most perfect knight. He
