In the Land of Giants

by Adams, Max;

  PEEL HARBOUR

  I have, over the years, compiled a map of sites where wics—coastal beaches with Early Medieval names that denote trading sites, markets or fairs—were sited around Britain’s coasts (the Gaelic equivalent may be porth or strand). North from the Scillies the north coast of Cornwall is not particularly friendly, but at Tintagel there was a royal and perhaps monastic site with a small harbour from as early as the fifth century which has yielded significant amounts of imported Mediterranean pottery. With a westerly wind it might just be made in a long single day’s passage from the Scillies. Directly north from Tintagel, Lundy Island has a beach, but is otherwise an unpromising port of call; on the other side of the Bristol Channel, though, on the south-west tip of Pembrokeshire, lie Milford Haven and several other appealing beach sites, including Watwick Bay, Musselwick Sands, Gateholm and Caldey Island (whence St Samson left on his travels after falling out with a drunken abbot). A few other islands off that coast offer good landing sites, too. Cardigan Bay has no wic names to tell of beach markets, but there are many early church sites, and plenty of sandy strands to land on. They may not have been popular with traders, though: the great inlet, easy to enter on a westerly, is difficult to leave on anything but an easterly. So from Pembroke onward northern travel must often have meant a long haul across to Dublin Bay or Dalkey Island just outside it; or to Holyhead, which had a famous early monastery and was a centre for British resistance against first Romans and then the Anglian warlords of North Britain.

  One other Dark Age site might have provided a slightly shorter leg: Bardsey Island, off the tip of the Llŷn peninsula, was originally Ynys Enlli (the ‘Island in the currents’), otherwise known as the Island of twenty thousand saints. Vicious currents and tidal races will defeat the unwary, but there is a good harbour sheltered from westerlies on the east side (as I found out later in the year), with relatively easy access both to the mainland and back out to sea. St Cadfan built a monastery here early in the sixth century, and the island was a pilgrimage destination until recent times. In legend it is one of many places where ‘King’ Arthur was buried. East of Anglesey, in an otherwise unpromisingly embayed location, there seems to have been an important trading beach at Meols on the tip of the Wirral. Although the site itself has either been buried by sand or washed away, many thousands of finds have been retrieved from here over the centuries, including a very rare and important pilgrim’s flask that came from St Menas’s shrine (Menas was another martyred Roman soldier) near Alexandria. Whether it was bought as a trinket, an important relic carrying holy water or oil, or whether it was brought back by a pilgrim to the Holy Land, we cannot say. Meols is perhaps an unlikely site: the key might be its location at the mouth of the River Dee, which gave access deep inland to Chester, the brine spring wics of its hinterland and the famous British monastery at Bangor-is-y-Coed (of painful memory).

  From Bardsey it is a relatively straightforward passage to Man where, depending on wind and tide, there are ports either to the west or east, although Peel is one of only a few landing sites on the rugged west coast. So the early sailor or pilot of a curragh was able to hop from one harbour to another, each one more or less accessible in a good day’s sailing or rowing, unless the fates intervened. Generally, such voyages as were made by saints and traders were confined to the summer months, April to October, perhaps; but the Irish Sea is notoriously fickle, subject to extreme tidal currents and to the short, choppy cross-seas that can undo all types of craft.

  Man was a valuable and much fought-over kingdom from at least the seventh century, when Edwin of Northumbria conquered it by a naval assault. At other times it was subject to the kings of Gwynedd, its cultural heritage largely that of the Britons. It was conquered by Vikings around 900; still, there was sufficient Irish influence here for the Manx language to be a variety of Gaelic. Rivers aside, there are few Brythonic place names. Manx language declined to the point, in 1974, where the last native speaker, ‘Ned’ Mandrell died. It is now being revived, but English is the lingua franca. The accent is like a soft Cumbrian.

  Peel was a cosy huddle of coloured houses, narrow streets rising up the hill from the broad sweep of pretty bay and harbour and river mouth crowded with boats and smokeries, only spoiled by the ill-sited power station that glowers down on it. The hills behind were emerald with dewy pasture, etched by drystone walls and the slick grey tarmac of narrow sine-wave lanes. Harbour facilities included a shower block, and the chance of a much-needed change into fresh clothes. Eda berthed too late for us to get a key; but Sarah, earning many Brownie points from her shipmates, slithered through a small high window in the ladies’ facilities and opened the door for us all to get in.

  After a sensational supper of roast lamb, and feeling clean and fragrant enough to join polite society, we left Eda riding at her mooring and went for a beer in a small pub that might have served as the set for a 1970s TV show. It was our first drink since the Scillies. We met a friend of Georgia’s, a member of the RNLI crew here (I remember thinking that she was a little rash in accepting an offer of a ride round the TT course on his bike in the morning). Apart from two-wheeled latter-day invaders and tax exiles, Man keeps to itself and life’s pace is slower than on the mainland. A long, hearty session would have been an excellent way to end this leg of the journey; but after a single pint we were all so tired that we drifted back to the boat and crashed, now surrounded by a bristling fleet of small trawlers. The day’s brooding clouds were gone. The sky, as Rolf put it, had been polished: spring constellations shone bright and the harbour lights, fragmented by the water’s rippling surface, seemed to bounce them back.

  The next morning, after a long, deep sleep with no watch on deck to interrupt it, I woke at seven-thirty and was out on deck soon after. The fishing fleet departing before first light had been ghostly quiet; now the morning was brilliant, and sitting on deck with a cuppa, taking pictures of the bay, I got chatting to a couple of local men perched on the harbour wall who had admired Eda and wanted a closer look. Slowly the boat came to life while the irresistible whiff of Chlöe’s Scotch pancakes wafted up through the galley skylight. The skipper briefed us on options for the next leg: a possible all-night transit through the North Channel to carry us clear of the Mull of Kintyre and Rathlin Island on a north-running tide; the winds persisting in unusual easterlies; possible anchorages along the Sound of Jura and beyond.

  Sarah, Rolf and I walked up Corrin Hill behind the castle: immense, invigorating panoramas along the rocky coast and out to sea, although Ireland was invisible behind a low bank of cloud that may just have been sea fret. The view down on the town and St Patrick’s Isle was breathtaking, with the green sea beyond in late April’s brilliant light and Eda’s slim, nut-brown hull and mast tiny and fragile-looking against the harbour wall. Late morning begged for a coffee in the sunshine at a café on the promenade. Then Sarah headed for the beach, Rolf for the lifeboat museum and I for an exploration of the castle, with its ruined medieval cathedral and St Patrick’s church. It seems that wherever a sailing boat finds a comfortable anchorage or mooring, there will be the site of an Early Christian shrine, a hermit’s cell, perhaps a burial ground and church or a fully developed monastery.

  The walls of the castle, probably belonging to the fifteenth century but owing their origins to the Anglo-Scottish wars of Edward I, enclose the whole of St Patrick’s Isle within its rocky natural defences. Inside, the stone remains of St Patrick’s church and its ninth- or tenth-century watchtower occupy a central, elevated platform, surrounded by a bank which may have defined a monastic vallum. It probably replaced an earlier wooden structure on the same spot. St German’s cathedral was first constructed in the twelfth century when it became the seat for a bishop, although its dedication may be original and pre-date the island’s ascription to Patrick.

  The Dark Age world and mindset were not nearly so small as we might suppose. Links with Rome, Jerusalem and Byzantium were never entirely severed; the sea was the means and memo
ry of transmission. Royal, secular powers liked to control the flow of trade even if they did not initiate it; ecclesiastical establishments first enjoyed the liturgical fruits of exotica—oil and wine, perhaps; then trinkets and relics; glass, pottery, books and letters. Sometimes a precious bundle of papyrus might make it all the way to these maritime lands from Egypt. In return, tin, slaves, furs, hounds, precious purple dye and other regional produce would turn up in the markets of Marseille, Alexandria or Ostia.

  Until about 650 the Atlantic lands of Britain and Ireland were the absorbers of energy from the fissile politics and trade of the post-imperial Mediterranean world; after that, their intellectual energy and literary brilliance fanned Europe’s cultural embers and left a legacy not just of enchanting monuments but also of a culture of learning and craft—the culture of the Lindisfarne Gospels, the Books of Durrow and Kells and the enormous, abiding political influence of Iona and Northumbria in fashioning a new sort of rational state from the raw material of tribal petty kingship. For all the pottery, glasswork and trade in objects and goods implied by the archaeology, the main freight in these centuries may have been people, information, learning and cultural energy—a cargo of thought.

  Lunch was a hot, juicy, distinctly indigenous kipper bap from the stall on the harbour wall—followed by a wander into town where we browsed a second-hand bookshop and bumped into clusters of shipmates enjoying their time off. We slipped our moorings at half-past three in the afternoon of a glorious clear, sunny day and cruised north-west with the descending slingshot arc of the sun ahead to port. The sea was milky flat, gelatinous almost, with not a breath of the promised easterly wind, so we chugged along on the engines as the sun, bursting into an egg-yolk orange disc of pure energy, brazed the rim of the horizon with its brilliance and slowly set, leaving a purple-orange glow to savour for the first hours of the evening watch. The silhouette of the Rhinns of Galloway framed the view ahead to starboard. On the Rhinns themselves, and along the coast of the Solway Firth, the remains of Early Medieval settlements abound: famous Latin-inscribed stones at Kirkmadrine; the British and Anglo-Saxon monastery at Whithorn, where large quantities of Frankish and Mediterranean imports have been found; Mote of Mark—a small coastal fort where once a craftsman in fine metals plied his trade; Ruthwell, where one of the great high Northumbrian crosses still stands. These were the lands and the sea-kingdom of the British of Rheged.

  Where Galloway comes closest to the Irish coast—and the North Channel is a mere twenty miles wide (narrower still where Kintyre opposes Rathlin), the villages and small towns are paradoxically among the more remote of Scottish communities. And yet, for the Early Medieval period and beyond, the Irish Sea basin is best looked at from the water, as a cultural and trading core united, not divided by the sea. Contacts, political and religious links, economic ties were lasting, sustained and penetrating. On the west side, the monasteries and royal centres of Strangford Lough, Down and Antrim looked not just to the competing kingdoms of ancient Ulster for allies and rivals, but also to the Gaelic Scots of Argyll and the Britons of Clyde and Solway Firth. By the beginning of the seventh century their fortunes were also entwined with those of the kings of Northumbria, whose Idings and Yffings were Britain’s most powerful and stable ruling dynasties for a hundred years before Bede.

  We sneaked through the North Channel at dead of night, the pulsing beacons of Rathlin and Sanda marking the reassuring bounds of deep water on either side. Later, Rolf and I couldn’t remember how much of that passage was under sail or powered: at one point we were dashing along on the tide at six knots with a steady wind on the starboard beam; at other times it seemed that the wind dropped off and Eda ran on her diesel engine. It was a night of intense watches, looking out for super-lit ferries crossing between Cairnryan and Larne; for smaller fishing vessels with their distinctive patterns of navigation lights drifting in and out of visibility ahead and to either side; then the immense loom of the Mull of Kintyre with its thousand-foot cliffs, absolutely dark and featureless and with seemingly not a soul living there, defined like a black hole by the absence of all light.

  The evolution of the sailing boat to something near perfection in the last days of the age of sail is the record of a deep, deep past of human travel, knowledge and engineering apprenticeship in these waters, going back four thousand and more years. Sometimes one feels the embrace of all those sailors as comrades, tied by a unity of relationship to the sea. At other times there is loneliness in the knowledge that it can take you at any time; that fate can intervene in any passage in spite of all our modern navigational aids, the familiarity of the waters and reliable weather forecasts. It is possible to be intimidated by the sea, especially when it grows very big; but there is something humbling and comforting in the idea that humans are only ever indulged by the earth’s oceans; the sea is never our servant.

  Rathlin Island, to port: three lights of its own, such are its dangers. Anciently, it had a monastery and it bears the unhappy history of being the first Irish church to be raided and plundered by Viking pirates in 795, just two years after Lindisfarne suffered the same fate. Contemporaries saw these visitations by heathen seafarers, during which their churches were burned, their shrines violated, their crosses overthrown, as acts of divine retribution for sins unconfessed or unaddressed. The Viking sailors who braved the northern seas were looking for cash and portable wealth so that they might go back to their homelands and afford brides in a polygamous society in which access to marriageable women had become increasingly an exclusive of the elite. The monks and nuns of the coastal foundations were easy prey, their divine protection withdrawn or simply inadequate. The raids precipitated a quarter of a millennium of conflict between the Atlantic peoples and the militarily brilliant Scandinavian raiders; depending on your point of view, the Viking legacy was either disastrous or a rich addition to the cultural exuberance of medieval Europe.

  Here is my diary entry for Friday 25 April:

  None of our watch can believe we have had four hours’ sleep when we’re dragged out of our bunks at 7.45. The winds have been variable all night; as we go on watch they are light and easterly but the engine is off. We see the cliffs of Antrim to SW; Rathlin Island on the beam; Islay forward to port; the Paps of Jura faintly ahead & Kintyre to starboard. We work our way up the coast making as much N and E as possible.

  Within ten mins of us going on watch the wind has risen to a stiff 4/5; we are steering stiff & with a heavy forefoot & it’s time to drop topsail, jib and reef the mainsail. So the off-watch is dragged back up; we heave-to in rocky waves, having been on a fast reach with the lee rail well under water… she’s happier & quicker with less canvas… And then 20 mins later, as we watch windfarms spinning on Kintyre, the wind drops dead, there’s no steerage, and we have to run the motor.

  And so it went all day. By the second dog-watch I was steering us through the narrowing Sound of Jura past the Point of Knap, and Kilmory, where Sarah and I had stumbled upon that blissfully sheltered chapel full of early sculpture during an autumn squall; Eda was just the right side of luffing and made her north-easting towards Crinan without getting too close to either shore, rails under water, riding the edge of a perfect wind along the ancient reptilian metamorphic scenery of the Tayvallich peninsula and the east coast of Jura. The skipper pointed out the cottage at Barnhill where Orwell wrote Nineteen Eighty-Four after the end of the war. It was exhilarating sailing, utterly absorbing of mind and body and lived entirely in the moment.

  So to Crinan: a quiet overnight anchorage off the mouth of the canal that connects our Sound with Loch Fyne and the Sound of Bute. I took the chance of a restful evening off-watch to try my hand at some fishing, while the skipper deployed a couple of creels. Neither of us had any luck; but a chicken casserole, the setting—knobbly rocks, a quiet cove, gentle fading light, a few time-expired vessels at their moorings; a hotel clinging to the shore below dense woodland; mountains beyond and a sturdy fortified tower-house, Duntrune Castle, standing
on the point—all those, and a late dram on deck after sunset, compensated. Dunadd, oddly, lay invisible beyond the bog of Mòine Mhòr, hidden by a one-hundred-and-fifty-foot-high spit on the north side of the bay through which the River Add drains. It was a pity not to be able to see the fortress from the sea; and I wondered how the sailor was welcomed to the ancestral seat of the Dál Riatan kings in the days of the curragh.

  We found out next morning as we motored off our anchorage past Ardnoe point, back across the mouth of Loch Craignish and out into the Sound of Jura. One of the great tidal races in the world was running at full tilt: to port it looked as though we must be approaching the foot of a weir: a wall of water, a standing wave, seemed to tumble over some invisible subaqueous dam, boiling the sea around us. Dashing from the Atlantic into the Sound, the tides have to squeeze into a narrow gap, less than a mile wide, between the northern tip of Jura and the island of Scarba. Through the Gulf of Corryvreckan, the ‘cauldron of the freckled seas’, these waters ebb and flow twice a day, forming a great natural wonder—a whirlpool notorious among sailors and marvellous to visitors watching from the safety of the shore or the deck of a powerful boat. We kept a discreet distance. Sarah promises to swim it some time (at slack water).

  Now I understood how complete was Dunadd’s location in Kilmartin Glen, protected by an expanse of bog, the ancestral legacy of megalithic burial monuments and its own impressive ramparts, and by the potent magic of a great swirling circle of mysterious currents,43 guarded in legendary days by the hag goddess Cailleach Bheur, who washed her plaid there. Any unwitting approach through the gulf by attackers or inexperienced sailors would lead to death; its safe passage must have been a sign of the indulgence of the king in his seat in the great mead hall at Dunadd. It is said that the roar of the whirlpool can be heard ten miles away.