When the track turned uphill behind the mill, it abruptly changed character. From a well-made road through leafy north Northumberland, I found myself suddenly thrashing through a temperate version of the Amazonian jungle, stung repeatedly by weapons-grade nettles and having to stop every few yards to work out where the path might go. Almost as bothersome were the repeated mouthfuls of spider webs as I brushed past tall undergrowth. At one point I confirmed I was on the right track because I saw a fresh bootprint on a molehill. But if moles were happily digging under a track, it might not be, well, a track. It was very difficult going indeed, and where low branches were too thick to push aside I had to duck low under them or occasionally crawl, hanking my rucksack as I did so. I should have packed a machete.
Eventually, I emerged from the tangled fringe of unkempt woodland by the river and came to what looked like the policies of a big house, perhaps Heaton Hill House. Hallelujah! At the other end of a new but very narrow wooden bridge, clearly intended to restrict passage across a deep burn to walkers only, I came upon more architecture by Hansel and Gretel, or possibly Bilbo Baggins. Clearly new and raised up off the ground with logs, a dainty, pale-blue, one-room hexagonal hut with an arched doorway, small windows and a chimney that turned out to have been built to house a barbecue. Set at table height, a fire pit was surrounded by benches covered with what looked like deer-skins and cushions. For barbecues in winter or bad weather, the hut looked an excellent idea, if more than a little twee.
Wide and green haughland lay beyond and, grateful for liberation from nettle stings, insect bites and facefuls of spider webs, I marched on along the riverbank. In the shade of a huge beech tree of the sort often found in the policies of big houses, a fisherman stood midstream in the Till, elegantly and expertly casting and recasting a luminous green line. The colour made the arc of his cast clearly visible. At my cautious and quiet approach, he reeled in and waded over to talk. Hoping for salmon, he had been even more pleased to get a sea-trout earlier and told me in what I judged to be a Geordie accent how much he loved the river and its peace. Having been advised by him that there was a path by the riverbank, I carried on past a spectacular, sheer sandstone cliff. It was like an illustration from a geology textbook of how sedimentary rock is formed. At the bottom were thick, hard folded strata while at the top, fifty feet and millions of years away, was a lighter coloured sandy soil that was being compressed, infinitely slowly, into harder rock. On top of that there was a thin layer of grass. Very neat. On a flat face at the bottom of the cliff, someone had etched a stylised tree, perhaps the tree of life, and near it there was an overhang that might well have sheltered a river traveller on a wet night in the seventh century.
But there was no path. It simply ran out in a dead stop at the foot of the cliffs. Instead of my usual instinct for rashness, I turned back. And for some distance, as many steps were retraced. I then followed a more elevated path, looking down on the river as it bent around a neatly situated house surrounded by beautiful trees (all seemed to have survived the gale, possibly because their location was so sheltered by the woods on the high riverbank) and closely clipped lawns. But then this path petered out and forced yet another retreat, the third of the day. You would think that after many miles walked I would have some idea by now how to do this properly. Rather than Ranulph Fiennes, this was exploration by Groucho Marx. Minutes later, I came across a low signpost that forgave a little of my waywardness. Placed some distance from the river, it read ‘Riverbank Path eroded, use Higher Footpath’. Well, thank you very much.
By the middle of the morning, it had grown even warmer, and between my rucksack and my back my shirt was damp. The Higher Path turned to be ill-cared-for and frankly dangerous, especially for the likes of me, with my propensity for pratfalls. Having clambered over a rotted and partially collapsed stile (where I hanked a bootlace on an exposed nail and twisted my leg), I followed a path that veered very close to another high cliff that dropped sixty feet sheer to the river.
Eventually, I thrashed out of the woods to meet a wide, made track with a very discouraging signpost. It told me that in two hours I had come one and three-quarter miles from Twizel Bridge and it was four miles to Etal. Pathetic. Disconcertingly, the track led sharply downhill and turned back the way I had come. When it reached the riverbank, however, it began to follow the course of the Till south-east towards the village. I saw signs with enigmatic numbers on them and realised that they were the reason for the good road. They marked different fishing beats, and fishermen had to get themselves and their kit to them by car. I made good time and by twelve noon, the country lunch hour for those who breakfast at seven in the morning, I sat down on a log to eat my sandwiches – smoked salmon, not cheese, a homage to the river.
I sat for longer than I meant to, watching ducks feeding, alerted by honking to a high arrowhead of geese flying south, and taking time to settle down after all the scratches, bites and scrambles from my morning in a temperate jungle. The peace of Cuthbert at last descended and I reflected that the elapse of fourteen centuries meant a great deal even in quiet, green and apparently unchanging places like this.
As a historian I have always tried, as far as is possible, to put myself in the shoes of people from our past, to imagine the landscape they inhabited. Wood was a vital resource for everyone in Britain until the Industrial Revolution began to produce synthetic materials in great volume. It was needed to build houses, make tools, carts and boats, and for heating and cooking. Bark made buckets and other containers, while specific woods like ash and alder were fashioned into spears and shields. That dependence made the seventh-century landscape different. Cuthbert rowed up a river that would not have been lined with mature woodland planted by estate owners for pleasure and good looks. In the early medieval period, and likely before that, trees were farmed and often zealously protected with rights, such as the gathering of firewood and the pasturing of pigs on beechmast carefully circumscribed. And in the same way, the rights to fishing and the pursuit of wildlife such as ducks, swans, geese and all of the other fauna that lived on the river, were defined in great detail. But while it looked different, and many more people will have lived on its banks, the Till would still have been peaceful and beautiful.
After making my way across more open haughland, I came across another strip of riverside woodland. The Ordnance Survey clearly showed a path through it, but when I came to a gate, a blue sign indicated in capital letters ‘RIVERSIDE STRICTLY PRIVATE’ and an arrow pointed left to direct walkers to a public footpath that led into a large gorse bush. In Scotland I would have had no difficulty ignoring this sign because of the freedoms of the right to roam legislation and the much older sense in Scots law that there was no such thing as trespass. But this was England, home of shotgun-toting retired military types, faces puce with rage, eyes bulging, moustaches twitching, bulldogs snarling. So I opened the gate and carried on. The Ordnance Survey is infallible, mostly, is it not?
After less than five minutes in Colonel Mustard’s Wood, I heard gunshots. Close by. And stopped. I recognised the softer pop of shotgun cartridges, a contrast with the sharper report of a rifle. I had seen several blue drums, those used as pheasant feeders, in the woods I had come through and then also remembered, better late than never, that the game-shooting season might be underway. Having paused to look carefully up the densely wooded bank, I could see no movement or hear any dogs or beaters putting up birds. Nevertheless, I found I was suddenly walking a lot more briskly. And my anxiety was not reduced when I came across a bench with a game bag on it and no one around who might own it. Eventually a path led diagonally up the bank and I found a very well-made track shelved into the rising ground. Beside it was a sign indicating a footpath by the riverbank that led to Twizel, exactly where I thought I had been walking. But it also carried a sign for a house I thought I had yet to reach. I looked again at the OS map and realised that I had mistaken one riverside wood for another and taken the wrong route. There was indeed a path which t
he blue sign prohibited, except that it was fairly overgrown – and definitely private. This was England, and I had been trespassing, and the Colonel would have been well within his rights to shoot me. By accident, of course. Or at least set the bulldogs on me. Sometimes I think my wife is right. I should not be allowed out on my own.
Staying well away from the edge, I followed the road until it arrived at one of the reasons I wanted to walk down the banks of the Till, and why I believed Cuthbert had chosen this route. The Ordnance Survey marks the site as St Mary’s Chapel but gives little idea of what a strange place it was to build a church. Little more than one or two courses of foundations, the ruins lie on a shelf long ago scooped out from the high and steep riverbank. Measuring only about fifteen by thirty feet, the old floor area was mostly puddled with water that had not fallen from the sky but bubbled up from a spring across the track. Beside it stood two ramshackle corrugated-iron sheds that had a wood-encased pipe connecting them with the bankside, the place where the spring surfaced. All that signified an enduring sanctity was a small modern cross placed on a low plinth, probably where the altar once stood. The spring water, probably holy in early medieval eyes, also had a more modern function, one I could not discover. Perhaps it had become a mineral spring.
St Mary’s Chapel intrigued me because I surmised that Cuthbert may have known of it, or at least the holy well that seeped out of the riverbank beside it. The dedication is also suggestive. Many of the great churches of the Tweed Valley, Melrose and Kelso abbeys amongst them, were dedicated to St Mary and my research had prompted the notion of a local cult around the life of the Virgin. This odd little church above the Till may have been part of this early group of sacred places. I could find no way to get down to the remains of the church – at least no way that looked safe – and so I walked on another few hundred yards to the pretty village of Etal, the other reason that drew me down the river with Cuthbert. Etal derives from Eata’s Haugh, and this may well be the clearest link of all, for it was the name of the Abbot of Old Melrose who agreed to admit Cuthbert and who later became the Abbot of Lindisfarne.
I am almost certain that Cuthbert visited Etal, and in the company of Eata at a time when neither were at peace with the world. Some time in the late 650s, King Aldfrith of Northumbria invited the Melrose abbot to found a new monastery at Ripon in Yorkshire. Eata took Cuthbert south and appointed him Guestmaster, the first important role for the young monk. But political tensions in the Church between the Irish Celtic strain of Christianity and those who believed that Roman practices and leadership should prevail were approaching a crisis and they forced a radical reversal of royal policy. When Eata refused to accept the direction of Rome and the papacy, he and Cuthbert were forced out of Ripon. This was done at the instigation of Wilfred, precisely the sort of churchman Cuthbert did not wish to be. Having travelled twice on pilgrimage to Rome, Wilfred was a deeply political figure who moved in and out of favour with the Northumbrian kings, sometimes at the centre of power, at other times sent into exile. He employed a retinue of armed retainers, and when the Melrose monks were ejected from Ripon he immediately took over and by 664 found himself on the right side of history, as the Synod of Whitby ruled in his favour.
Wilfred and Cuthbert were rivals in another sense. Soon after his death on Inner Farne in 687, a saintly cult swirled around the memories and miracles of Cuthbert’s exemplary life. When copies of the Anonymous biography began to circulate after 705, Wilfred was in exile, and two years before, he and his supporters had been excommunicated by a council summoned by Aldfrith. When the king died in 705, Wilfred returned even more powerful as the adoptive father of Osred, Aldfrith’s successor on the throne of Northumbria. Before his own death in 709, this highly political priest was in control of the bishopric of Hexham and of the monastery at Lindisfarne. Compiled to bribe and influence, his treasure was divided amongst his followers and very quickly they commissioned a Life of Wilfred that related miracles and promoted his own saintly cult. Written by Stephanus Eddius, a choirmaster brought north from Kent, the Vita Wilfridis was copied and recopied. When it began to circulate, Bede of Jarrow set to work to counter it with his own prose Life of Cuthbert. The lives and works of these two saints could not have been more different.
At the end of the seventh century, and for some considerable time afterwards, the conferring of sainthood was largely a local matter, and if miracles were associated with a monk, nun or priest, or indeed a secular figure (such as King Oswald of Northumbria), then that was usually enough. When lives of saints, listing their miracles, acts of charity and examples of their piety, appeared, reputations were consolidated and cults began to flourish.
By the middle of the twelfth century, Pope Alexander II decided that the papacy should have the exclusive right to make saints. The process instituted and refined by medieval popes has changed very little. It begins with the spontaneous growth of a posthumous cult around the life and works of an outstandingly pious person, often a priest, nun, bishop or even a pope. An application is then made to the Congregation for the Causes of Saints, and the Vatican bureaucracy rumbles into action. Sometimes it can take centuries. A miracle is needed, at least one, and supporters of the cult figure often try to bring one about by praying that he or she will intercede with God. Virtually any incident thought to be related to the prayers, such as a recovery from a serious or life-threatening illness, is then investigated by the Congregation. If the miracle is substantiated, then the cult figure advances to a different stage and becomes beatified. Such demi-saints are given the title of Blessed. To move on from there to sainthood, a second miracle is needed, and if that bears examination, then a case is prepared to go before the Congregation court. A Postulator argues that sainthood ought to be conferred and a figure known as the Devil’s Advocate argues against. If the case is proven, only then are saints made.
History has not been kind to one saintly woman Cuthbert knew well. Queen Aethelthryth, or Etheldreda, the wife of King Ecgfrith of Northumbria, had a chapel dedicated to her in Yetholmshire in the foothills of the Cheviots, one of Lindisfarne’s major possessions. Under the French rendering of her name, St Audrey became very popular in the south of England in the medieval period. Held on her feast day and birthday, St Audrey’s Fair at Ely became famous, particularly for the fine quality of the jewellery and silk scarves on sale. Sadly, these were supplanted over time by cheap imitations and the word ‘tawdry’ was coined as a contraction of St Audrey.
When Eata and Cuthbert set out on the long and melancholy journey from Ripon back to Old Melrose, they probably travelled north on the old Roman road of Dere Street. Still in good condition, it lay close to the monastery seized by Wilfred’s supporters, perhaps his armed retinue. When the road crossed Hadrian’s Wall, the two companions may have continued northwards on the Devil’s Causeway, another Roman road that led to the port at the mouth of the Tweed at Berwick. It crosses the Till some way upstream from Etal, and the fastest and most sensible route from there to Old Melrose was by curragh, allowing the current to take them down the river to its confluence with the Tweed. A larger boat, rowed by several oarsmen, could easily have made good time as Eata and Cuthbert returned to their mother monastery. After their expulsion from Ripon, it must have seemed like a sanctuary.
Apart from St Mary’s Chapel, no trace of these ancient associations remains above ground. Instead, Etal is a single street of white cottages, some of them thatched and all refurbished by the owner of the local estate in the early twentieth century. The street leads to a medieval castle. Even though it is only half a dozen miles from the Scottish border, Etal looks very English indeed, a Miss Marple village that would not look out of place in the Cotswolds or the Chilterns.
Cuthbert had an unwitting hand in the beginnings of these stark cultural differences because his fame and exemplary life gave rise to one of the earliest definitions of Englishness. Much of early Northumbria was organised into shires, usually much smaller areas than the more modern counties
that were largely abolished in 1974. Some of these little shires came into the possession of Lindisfarne and the collective term for the church’s estates became St Cuthbert’s Land, a label later used by the prince-bishops of Durham to describe their vast holdings in the north of England. Islandshire stretched along the coastal plain from south of Lindisfarne up to the mouth of the Tweed. The farms of this fertile area supplied most of the monks’ needs and their produce was carted across the sands at low tide. The Till flows through Norhamshire and its centre was the matrix ecclesia, the mother church at Norham, a place that would come to play a part in the creation of the cult of Cuthbert.
When the border between England and Scotland began to harden along the banks of the Tweed, some of Lindisfarne’s possessions, mainly gifts from the king and the nobility of old Northumbria, were cut adrift. Coldinghamshire, the estates around the monastery where Cuthbert had his feet dried by the sea-otters, found itself in an anomalous position since it lay well to the north of the border. Yetholmshire in the foothills of the Cheviots was eventually divided up. In a process that is difficult to date securely but was underway by the twelfth century, the people who lived in Islandshire and Norhamshire began to call themselves the Haliwerfolc, the people of the Holy Man, the people of Cuthbert. The glories and memories of Northumbria were fading as the border between England and Scotland began to fracture a culture fashioned and shared on both sides of the Tweed.
To the Island of Tides Page 15