To the Island of Tides

by Alistair Moffat

  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.

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  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 was also devout and interested in the new, reformed orders of monks who were becoming influential in France. When he became an earl with wide lands in Southern Scotland, he invited communities of these men to found monasteries in the Tweed Valley.

  In 1124 Alexander I died without an heir and his younger brother, Earl David, succeeded. Anxious to strengthen the bounds of his new kingdom and to retain control of the Church, a key engine of royal government, the king had a problem with Old Melrose. With the cult of Cuthbert securely anchored in England at Durham, where the spectacular new cathedral had risen on the river peninsula of the Wear, many of the sites associated with the saint were claimed by the prince-bishops, including Old Melrose. But David wanted to re-found the monastery there and he had invited a group from the order of Cistercians to come to the Tweed Valley. To appease Durham, he exchanged St Mary’s Church in Berwick-upon-Tweed for the ancient site – and immediately ran into another problem. For reasons now lost, Abbot Richard and his Cistercians refused to build on the river peninsula, even though it was the holiest and most famous church in the Borders, a place where saints had walked and worshipped. They preferred to found their new monastery at a place called Little Fordell, two and a half miles to the west, beyond the ruins of the Roman depot at Trimontium, on the southern bank of the Tweed. But probably at King David’s insistence, they kept the name of Melrose.

  Folk toponymy associates it with the mels or the mallets used by masons to build the abbey and the Rose Window at the east end of the church. But in fact it is a synthesis of two Gaelic words. Rhos, or Ross in the anglicised spelling, means ‘a promontory’ and describes the old river peninsula, but maol is more obscure. It can mean ‘bare’ and many believe that the definition ends there. ‘Bare promontory’ was how Old Melrose looked in the seventh and eighth centuries, long before the mighty trees of the nineteenth-century estate were planted. But, in fact, that is a misreading, and the reality is more interesting. Maol can also mean ‘bald’, and the old Druidic tonsure cut across the crown of the head made Celtic monks look bald. And from that, it acquired a further meaning that can be detected in the Christian name of Malcolm. It comes from Maol Choluim and means ‘a follower of St Columba of Iona’. And so in Gaelic, maol became a term for a monk, ‘a bald man’, and so Melrose was ‘the promontory of the monks’.

  Cuthbert and his servant arrived at the monastery with a great deal more dignity than I had managed, but I believe he entered it at approximately the same place. Hidden in woodland to the east of an old track that was once a drove road in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries lies all that remains of the fabric of Old Melrose. Across the narrow neck of the peninsula, the monastic vallum was dug and its shallow ditches on either side of a central bank can still be made out amongst the lush green ferns and the willowherb. Much deeper when Cuthbert first saw it and almost certainly topped by a wooden palisade rammed into the compacted earth of the upcast, it marked a boundary between worlds. To the west lay the world the young man was leaving – the fields, farms and woods where men and women toiled, where warbands rode and killed, and where devils lurked in the dark places. Beyond the vallum was a place of light where the peace of God bathed the land, where the air was daily purified by the power of prayer and where holy men walked. Old Melrose was a portal, a place where monks strove through privation and contemplation to know the mind of God, where they looked with longing to the sky, hoping to approach Him and His angelic hosts more closely.

  When I came at last to the vallum, I saw that it was crossed in two places and guessed that where I stood, the point at which the modern, tarmac road runs up to Old Melrose House, was the original gate, what Cuthbert would have understood as the first door to paradise. It lies closer to the track from Monksford. Here is Bede’s account of what took place when Cuthbert and his servant arrived:

  Now Boisil himself, who was standing at the gates of the monastery, saw him first; and foreseeing in spirit how great the man whom he saw was going to be in his manner of life, he uttered this one sentence to those standing by: ‘Behold the servant of the Lord!’ thereby imitating Him who, looking upon Nathaniel as he came towards Him, said: ‘Behold an Israelite indeed in whom there is no guile’. Thus is wont to testify that pious and veteran servant and priest of God, Sigfrith, who was standing with others near Boisil himself when he said these words . . . Without saying more, Boisil forthwith kindly received Cuthbert on his arrival, and when the latter had explained the reason of his journey, namely that he preferred the monastery to the world, Boisil still more kindly kept him. For he was Prior of that same monastery. And after a few days, when Eata of blessed memory arrived, who was then a priest and the abbot of the monastery and afterwards both abbot and bishop of the church at Lindisfarne, Boisil told him about Cuthbert, declaring that his mind was well disposed, and obtained permission from him for Cuthbert to receive the tonsure and to join the fellowship of the brethren.

  Much moved to find myself standing almost certainly in the same place where this momentous exchange took place, I sat down by the wrought-iron railings of a grass park to re-read Bede’s account of the meeting at the gates. Aside from any other interpretation (was the entry of Cuthbert to Old Melrose agreed beforehand? Was there a payment?), what struck me most forcibly was the role, presence and voice of Boisil.

  Probably a Gaelic-speaking Irish monk who came with Aidan from Iona when he founded the mother house at Lindisfarne in 631, Boisil is sometimes credited with the establishment of the first community at Old Melrose. But as Bede was careful to note, he was not abbot and not able to admit Cuthbert without permission from Eata. Unlike his contemporaries, Boisil may have adopted his name. It is a Gaelicised version of Basil. An early bishop who led a famously ascetic life in the provinces of the Near East, what was becoming the Byzantine Empire in the fourth century, St Basil fought against heresy but eventually died, exhausted and enfeebled by the fasting and rigours of his exemplary life.

  Boisil’s own piety
was much revered, and not only by Cuthbert. Three miles to the south of Old Melrose lie the villages of St Boswells and Newtown St Boswells, both named to honour the old monk. Their local pronunciation seems to get closer to him. Borderers call St Boswells, Bowzuls. At Benrig, a pretty hamlet half a mile from the older village, there once stood St Boisil’s Chapel, only demolished in 1952. And a further link with Old Melrose was embedded in an ancient place-name. St Boswells used to be know as Lessudden, and it means ‘the place of Aidan’. How and when one was supplanted by the other is long forgotten, but what the names signify was probably ownership. At some point in the history of Old Melrose, beginning soon after Cuthbert’s coming, land was gradually gifted to the monks in return for certain privileges.

  In the early Middle Ages and beyond, the idea of holy ground was not metaphorical. Where holy men had walked and prayed was literally physically sanctified and if a body was buried inside the monastic precinct of Old Melrose, and indeed many other sites where monks or priests had defeated demons and made the land sacred, it was believed that the earth itself would wash away mortal sin as the flesh rotted down to bone. Wealthy people were prepared to give lavish gifts in return for burial beyond the monastic vallum.

  Much later, Anglo-Norman noblemen sometimes endowed a monastery on condition that they be admitted to the community as novices as the end of their days drew near. That meant they were guaranteed burial inside the sacred precinct, perhaps even under the floor of the church and close to the high altar. This was known as taking vows ad succurrendum, which translates as ‘at the run’ or ‘in a hurry’. Robert Avenel, Lord of Eskdale and Richard de Morville of Lauder both became novices at the new abbey of Melrose and were buried under the floor of the church. Such privileges did not come cheap, and in 1216 Sir Alan Mortimer made over half of his estate to the old diseart that became the abbey of Inchcolm in the Firth of Forth if the monks would allow him to be buried in the church.

  After re-reading Bede’s account of Cuthbert’s coming to the monastery, I walked through the sunshine up the road to Old Melrose House. It sits close to the highest point of the plateau and stands at what was the heart of the seventh-century community. In a copse beyond the house lie the ruins of an early medieval chapel dedicated to St Cuthbert. Under the shade of the trees, there is nothing much to see now; the only animation came from a group of small and excitable pigs (perhaps they thought I had come to feed them) who woke from their slumber in the warm afternoon to run around their pen as I passed.

  Encircling the house and its knoll are wide, tree-fringed grass parks with nothing 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.

  There was no dubiety in the Christian era. Robert Avenel, Richard de Morville and many others believed absolutely that their internment inside the precinct at Melrose would eventually wash away their earthly sins and greatly enhance and ease their passage from this life to the next. And what happened after death obsessed the minds, practices and beliefs of the early monks and saints like Aidan, Boisil and Cuthbert. It seemed that all of their waking lives, and even their dreams and visions, were a preparation for the afterlife and the mortification of the flesh, the hours and days of prayer and vigil an attempt at cementing certainty, the s
ure and certain means of gaining entry to the Kingdom of Heaven. When on Brotherstone Hill Cuthbert saw a shimmer of angels bear Aidan’s soul up through the clouds, it was nothing less than the justified reward for a saintly life of sacrifice led in the service of God and His truth. And what were the privations and sacrifices of a brief mortal life compared with the promise of an eternity in glory?

  It may be that Walter Elliot has discovered hints of a remarkable continuity. Are the rings of graves, if they are graves, around the wooden henges at Old Melrose evidence of a pagan belief in an afterlife? They certainly demonstrate that our prehistoric ancestors thought that the place of burial (almost certainly for an elite, just as in the Middle Ages) was important and to be planted in holy ground was not an end but a transition. Otherwise, why bother? And it is significant that these henges were raised in the sight if not of God then certainly of a place of gods, Eildon Hill North.

  As I wandered around the sunlit grassy parks where Walter found the circles of post-holes, I found myself musing on another transition, no less profound, if difficult to quantify. It is commonplace to assert that in the early twenty-first century we in Britain live in an increasingly secular age. Churches are everywhere closing and finding new uses, congregations are shrinking or merging, and it may be that for the first time in human history we are living in a society where most people do not believe in an afterlife, or at least postpone consideration of that until time begins to press on them. And more, does this not mean that we now fail to prepare for death in any clear or meaningful way?