upstanding, no archaeological remains of any kind. It was as though the old monastery had never existed and the land had always been the leafy policies of a country house. Horses were grazing contentedly and nearby someone had set up showjumps in a practice area. But some sense of what once stood there can be found in Bede’s work. He described Old Melrose’s mother house of Lindisfarne as a very simple group of monastic cells probably made from wattle and daub with a wooden church near the centre of the precinct that had at first been roofed with reeds. There were probably one or two communal buildings, a cemetery and several fields for crops and pens for animals. All was enclosed by a monastic vallum.
The arrangement for Old Melrose is likely to have been similar: its wooden buildings all of wood; the monks’ cells made from wattle and daub walls, and the chapel and other communal spaces from timber, all perishable. However, under the lush grass my old friend Walter Elliot has traced the watermark of sanctity.
Using an ancient method, Walter has brought the site back to life, discovering a great deal about what the monastery may have looked like and indeed what happened on the river peninsula long before the monks came to the promontory.
Walter is a diviner. Through his business as a fencing contractor, he found he was able to pinpoint all manner of underground features without the use of a shovel, using instead two metal coat hangers (or pieces of fence wire bent at right angles) held loosely in his fists. Much less energy-sapping and time-consuming than digging, and far more precise. Post-holes show up very readily, as well as water courses and pits, and as his fascination with history and archaeology developed, Walter began to walk across sites with his rods in his fists where he suspected there were the remains of buildings now lost in the grass. And he finds them. I have seen him do it time and again. And as they swing around, what the rods tell him is confirmed by subsequent investigation. Why it works, no one (including Walter) is sure. But it does.
Particularly in dry summers, aerial photographs can reveal what is invisible on the ground. In 1983, the Royal Commission for Ancient and Historic Monuments initiated a survey that included Old Melrose. Studying the subsequent photographs, Walter noticed a series of faint circular markings in the grass parks to the north-west of the wooded knoll, the site of St Cuthbert’s Chapel and the estate house, that he reckoned to be the centre of the old monastery. When he walked slowly over the park with divining rods, quartering the ground carefully and noting and pegging what showed up as ground disturbance as he went, Walter found that the faint circles were in fact low banks and concentric rings of post-holes that enclosed areas that varied in diameter from approximately thirty feet to eighty feet. And beyond the edges of these circles were rows of rectangular pits that very closely resembled the outlines of graves.
Across Britain, archaeologists have discovered traces of similar structures. It seemed highly likely that on the site of the monastery Walter had found something much older, what is known as a wood henge. The most famous lies two miles to the south of Stonehenge in Wiltshire and it was first detected as faint circular markings by an aerial survey carried out in 1925. Later investigation revealed that Woodhenge was raised in the third millennium BC, and was still a focus of worship and ceremonial of some unknowable sort in 1800 BC.
Far easier and faster to build than stone henges, the function of these places was mysterious – but their essential nature unambiguous. Henges appear to have been first dug in Orkney as ditches and banks marked around by standing stones (more plentiful than trees in the Northern Isles) that served as temples of some kind. And just like the monastic vallum at Old Melrose and elsewhere, the circles of felled trees or quarried stones and their banks and ditches were set up as a means of separating the sacred ground from the temporal world around them. The simple duality of inside and outside was already present, something that persisted well into modern times. The mysteries of the mass took place behind a screen in abbeys, churches and cathedrals for many centuries and were heard but not seen by the lay congregation. Something of a similar sort may have taken place thousands of years before at henges. Those inside enacted rituals and sacrifices, probably chanted and played music, lit fires in the winter darkness and processed out through a throng of people who had heard but not witnessed the ceremonies.
If Walter Elliot has indeed discovered a series of wood henges at Old Melrose, that means something simple and very moving. The river peninsula had been revered as a holy place for more than two or three thousand years before the monks came from Lindisfarne. And if the rectangular pits arranged around them like the spokes of a wheel are indeed graves, then the desire to be buried in sacred ground was neither a purely Christian practice or new to the early Middle Ages. And what is even more intriguing are the reasons why a prehistoric, pagan culture wanted to bury its dead close to sacred ground.
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