I marched back downhill and slid and scrambled under more electric fencing, very warm by now, with flies buzzing around me, trying not to become bad-tempered, I remembered another spectacularly bad piece of map-reading more than fifty years before, one that made me smile.
In the mid-1960s orienteering was a new sport in Scotland, imported from the forests of Scandinavia, and at Kelso High School we had Mr Climie, a real enthusiast. Having taught us the basics of map-reading with a Swedish Silva compass, we were then told to set off in search of a series of controls or check-points hidden in the Bowmont Forest, near Kelso. It seemed like good fun, very different, thinking and running at the same time. For the 1965 Scottish Schools Championships we went up to the vast forests around Aberfoyle in Highland Perthshire. The idea was to run around a course in the correct sequence and have your map time-stamped by the officials at each control. The fastest team would be the winners.
In our team of four I was last to go and almost immediately made a catastrophic error. I read my compass bearing 180 degrees wrong and ran round the course backwards, arriving at the finish, which turned out to be the start. My three team-mates had made good times, but to win we needed all four competitors to complete, even though my time would be terrible. They shouted to me that there was only forty minutes to go before the course and the competition would shut down. I turned round and set off again, knowing exactly where all the controls were, having already visited them – in reverse order. I re-appeared at the gate into the field where the finish was with only a few minutes remaining and, responding to the agitated cries of my teammates, I sprinted home and we won – just.
Having discovered the sign for the real Brotherstone Farm, I finally managed to park in the right place and began once more to walk uphill. A very rough and pitted track ran off to the west, and so I ignored it and climbed a gate to join another that ran to the north-east, the direction I wanted to go. Or so I thought.
Almost immediately I was met by a wall of very dense and prickly gorse bushes. Having turned to the west, I then ran into another insurmountable obstacle: the sheer face of an old sandstone quarry. It seemed that Cuthbert and the Brothers’ Stones were working hard to keep their secrets. In fact all of my journey to Lindisfarne would turn out to involve mistakes and more than a little effort, emphatically not a tour guided by a handbook or a reliable map, either paper or cerebral. I had guessed that ‘pilgrimage’ would probably involve adversity, but not that most of it would be self-inflicted.
When I began to wade through waist-high willowherb and nettles to the side of the quarry, the sun had climbed high in the sky and a cloud of flies was circling around my damp hair and forehead. But then the weeds and the gorse thinned and the walking suddenly improved as I breasted the ridge above the quarry. And there in the distance, on the crown of the easternmost of the Brotherstone Hills, clearly silhouetted against a cobalt-blue sky, was a tall standing stone.
A well-used track, rutted by wheeled vehicles, led up to the stone and gradually I saw that it was the same one that had seemed to swing away out to the west. It had turned towards the sitka spruce plantation and then aimed directly at the summit of the hill. The walking was easy and, as I climbed, the vistas on all sides began to reveal themselves. They were panoramic, long views to all points of the compass, some of them more than twenty miles. A breeze began to cool me, the flies fled and I walked the last few hundred yards in a good rhythm.
As I neared the summit of the hill, the second stone revealed itself, having been hidden by a rocky outcrop. Both were very bulky, not like the slender slivers of the Stones of Stenness, or the Ring of Brodgar on Orkney, or Calanais on the Isle of Lewis, and they no doubt weighed many tons. The taller Brother towered over me at well over two and a half metres and the other was shorter, more stumpy. As if ignoring these majestic, dramatic ancient monuments to a forgotten faith, the farm track ran precisely between them before dipping downhill towards the Cow Stone. It too was very bulky, standing about three hundred metres to the north-east, looking as though it had been carefully placed in some sort of alignment with the stones up on the summit. But the tracks of modern traffic could not diminish the magic of this place.
Probably dragging them with ropes over log rollers, the people who erected the stones on Brotherstone Hill expended great labour to set them there. But while the details of their religious rites will almost certainly never be discovered, the reason why they raised the standing stones on the hill could not have been clearer to me. The panorama was so vast, so heart-piercingly beautiful in the midday sun, that to stand by the Brothers’ Stones and simply gaze at it was thrilling.
Below us the valley of the Tweed, the great, life-giving river, widens as the Tweed winds its way east to the sea between the sheltering hills. To the south rise the foothills of the Cheviots, and I could see the rounded shape of Yeavering Bell, a place Cuthbert would come to know. Clouds clustered over the long hump of Cheviot itself and my eye was led to the watershed ridge running west, the line of the English border, where I could pick out the twin peaks of the Maiden Paps. Closer is the conical, volcanic shape of Ruberslaw and beyond it the hills of the Ettrick Forest. Much closer rise the Eildons, Roman Trimontium, the three hills that dominate the upper Tweed Valley: Eildon Hill North, Eildon Mid Hill and Eildon Wester Hill.
To the north-west, also close, is Earlston Black Hill, Dun Airchille, the Meeting Fort – all places where the strangeness and romance of Thomas of Ercildoune, True Thomas, Thomas the Rhymer, still clings. A prophet who foresaw the death of Alexander III in 1286 and whose predictions were widely believed and repeated, Thomas was perhaps the most famous Scotsman of the Middle Ages. The low ridges of the Lammermuirs lie to the north, many studded with groups of elegant white wind turbines, their sails turning lazily in the breeze. And standing up proud above the horizon in the north-east, I could easily make out the summits of Great Dirrington Law and Little Dirrington Law.
Forming a vast natural amphitheatre, the hills surround the courses of the great river and its tributaries on three sides. On the fourth, to the east, the horizon dips low as the patchwork of ripening fields edge down towards the seashore. With a hand on the cool mass of the taller of the two Brothers, its surface smoothed by the winds, rain and snows of 5,000 winters, I looked and looked out over a landscape I know intimately but one I had never gazed upon from this place. And somewhere in my memory, deep inside my sense of myself, the warmth of an old love began to glow once more.
I was born and raised in the valley of the great river and I know that my ancestors have been on the banks of the Tweed for many, many centuries, ploughing the fields, coaxing food from the soil, perhaps seventy generations living and dying within sight of the sheltering hills. The rich red and black earth is grained in my hands. But as I grew older, sat and passed (mostly) exams, heeded the advice of my parents ‘to get on’ and ‘stick in at the school’ and ‘make something of yourself’, I knew I would have to leave, have to tear up deep roots and go and live somewhere else. And so I did. After university at St Andrews, Edinburgh and London, I was, to my amazement, appointed to run the Edinburgh Festival Fringe in 1975 and despite my youth (I was twenty-five) and inexperience, I made a success of it. My big break; it led to everything else and a twenty-year career in television that brought rewards and occasional satisfaction. But I always nursed a need to come home, to return to the Tweed Valley, and having bought our little farmhouse, I decided to resign my well-paid job and begin the precarious life of a freelance writer. At forty-nine, I still had energy and ambition. And so for almost twenty years I have lived and worked in the Scottish Borders – and gradually taken all of its beauties and glories for granted.
When I climbed the hill to look at the stones, I had given little thought to the hill itself, the place the old peoples had chosen, but when I looked out from it, the elemental power of its beauty flooded back, an uncomplicated, unconditional love for the fields, forests, hills and intimate valleys of my native land, my home-place. That reminder was to be the first of Cuthbert’s gifts.
And up on the hill, history was whispering. The Eildon Hills to the south-west rose abruptly from the floodplain of the Tweed, their flanks steep, their three-summit outline
