across the sea. At the time I did not know it was the Longstone light on the Farne Islands, the place from where Grace Darling and her father set out in their famous recue of shipwrecked sailors. Idiotically, I wondered if the light showed up our position to the bands of desperadoes who were roaming in the gloaming, hunting for us.
After a time, I turned to see that my companions were lying still, fast asleep. It was a balmy, windless night, well lit by a full moon, the sort of half-dark sometimes called the summer dim in the north of Scotland, and as thoughts of marauding bands of policemen gradually faded and a silence settled, I found myself looking, almost hypnotically, over the endless wastes of the North Sea and listening to the wash of the waves. To the south, there was enough light in the sky to see the outline of Bamburgh Castle, although I was not sure what it was. Little by little, the dune became less like a rampart and more like a high vantage point, a place from where I could see the sky, the sea and the land. My watchnight cannot have lasted more than an hour or perhaps two, but I remember it vividly.
Perhaps I am reading history backwards, but I think on that moonlit, silent night a peace descended on me, something I had not felt before. It may be that after the excitements, exertions and daftnesses of the day I simply relaxed, realising that no one was looking for us, that we were alone out in the dunes. But if that was so, then surely I would have fallen asleep like my companions. Instead, without knowing it, I think I was keeping vigil, unconsciously allowing the spirits of that place to swirl around me and release a sense of inner calm as I looked out over Creation. This may sound highly unlikely for a fifteen-year-old boy on the threshold of life, but looking back across the years I believe it to be true. It turned out to be a beginning of sorts.
Ignorant of the phrase, I sensed then that the island had a powerful genius loci, was a place of spirits. And each of the many times I have returned in the last fifty years, knowing more, I began slowly to realise that for me Lindisfarne might be more than beautiful, atmospheric. It might be the saving of me.
* * *
Now nearing the end of my seventh decade, I need to face some actuarial facts. I may have ten more summers of active, relatively healthy life in front of me, if I am lucky. But to enjoy them – and face the end when it comes – I need to change what is in my heart and soul. With much more past than future, I have found myself dwelling not so much on good memories as on the darknesses, all that went wrong, bad mistakes I made, people I hurt, people who wronged me or ignored me. In the half-light of early morning, drifting in and out of sleep, the ghosts of disappointments, mistakes, slights and regrets flit through my mind too often and I fear I am becoming more and more bitter rather than wise, accepting and forgiving, clinging to the hurts of the past rather than savouring the everyday joys of the present. What I need to find is some peace of mind and it occurred to me that if I took myself to Lindisfarne for a time, I might find some in that place of spirits. After all, the old name Ynys Medcaut, from Insula Medicata, means ‘the isle of healing’.
Buried for more than a century on the island, and once its bishop, Cuthbert was the great saint of the north. Durham Cathedral and the vice-regal powers of the medieval prince-bishops are his direct legacy and his tomb is still much venerated. But I believe that his spirit has never left Lindisfarne. As Cuthbert and his ascetic companions watched the sun rise over the grey chill of the North Sea and listened to the bleak music of the winds and the waves, they knew that all of the elements of the world were writ large before them. Somewhere in the huge skies above the island, God was moving and they prayed that somehow His spirit would descend and be revealed in this place that stood apart from the world.
Probably born and raised as the younger son of Anglian lords in the hills of Lauderdale in the Scottish Borders, Cuthbert came to the monastery at Old Melrose some time around 650 or 651. While tending sheep one starry night, the boy had looked out to the east and seen a vision, believed to be the ascent of the soul of St Aidan from his church on Lindisfarne. Much moved by this, Cuthbert rode to meet the monks in the loop of the River Tweed at Old Melrose and asked to take holy orders. When Prior Boisil died a few years afterwards, the shepherd boy succeeded him. And then, perhaps in 676, he laid down the cares of office and began life as a wandering hermit, seeking to move closer to God. Two caves near the Northumberland coast are associated with his exemplary life.
But by Christmas 686, Cuthbert knew that he was beginning to die and, having been reluctantly appointed Bishop of Lindisfarne two years before, he put down his cope, pectoral cross and staff to return to the purity and peace of his solitary life in the cold hermitage on Inner Farne. A short time later, he died.
As I have said, I am no Christian, and nor does mortification of the flesh hold many attractions, but I would like to seek something of the peace Cuthbert sought at the end of his life. My DNA ancestry is Northumbrian, as his must have been, and my people sailed the North Sea in the fifth and sixth centuries from Denmark and southern Sweden to settle on the eastern coasts and in the river valleys of Britain just as his people did. I was born and raised only a short distance from the hills where he tended sheep. I know that thirteen centuries separate us, but perhaps I could walk the holy ground of Lindisfarne in Cuthbert’s footsteps; perhaps some of the eternal spirits of that magical place would speak to me.
I began to plan a secular pilgrimage, to walk from the ancient monastery at Old Melrose to what I had come to think of as the Island of Tides, and on my way I would visit places where Cuthbert prayed, preached and wrought miracles. As well as trying to understand something of the harsh lives of these leathery old saints and their efforts to know the mind of God, I knew during this journey of endings and beginnings I would also come across some glorious, life-enhancing colour – from the disciplined joy of the Lindisfarne Gospels, the glittering culture of the kingdom of Northumbria, the scholarship of Bede of Jarrow, as well as the story of Cuthbert, one of the first and perhaps the greatest saint of Britain. And maybe I would discover on the Island of Tides that the tides in the lives of men are not so very different.
2
The Hill of Faith
It was a day of high summer. A cloudless July sky, perfectly still, without even a breath of a breeze riffling the topmost leaves of the old sycamores on the ridge above the track. In the Tile Field, about half a mile below our farmhouse, all the sheep and cattle were lying down and the only animals I could see moving were the four horses who graze the field beyond them. They are at a DIY livery at the neighbouring farm and each morning one or two women come with bowls of hard feed and a barrow to pick up their muck. It was so quiet I could hear them talking. It is astonishing how sound carries across our little valley, and this morning I could clearly hear the bleat of sheep in the fields above Brownmoor, as well as the distant purr of a quad bike as the shepherd went up onto the southern ridge to check on the flock about a mile to the south.
As Maidie, my West Highland terrier puppy, and I walked along the track by the old wood, the women must have been three-quarters of a mile away. Not far enough for Maidie. A very territorial terrier, she had stopped when the horsewomen began to speak, pricked her ears and barked loudly at them. How dare they! Who are they? This set off the collies up at Brownmoor, and then moments later, across the stillness of the morning, I heard the big, booming bark of Chiquita at Burn Cottage down at the bottom of the Long Track that leads to our farm. She is a huge Newfoundland. Doggy stereo rang round the hills. But it soon calmed down and we walked on through the waking landscape, stopping and staring at all our familiar glories.
We live on a small farm in the Scottish Borders. At least I think we do. I have never been sure what to call the little bit of the planet we own and look after. At eighty acres, it is bigger than a smallholding or a croft; I would wince if anyone called it an estate, but it seems too small to be a farm. We do not grow any crops except grass, and my wife manages about twenty-five acres of pasture to breed horses. So, I guess ‘small farm’ is the least inaccurate description. Below the house we have gradually built up a stable block that now has ten loose boxes, a hay barn and a tack room,
