To the Island of Tides

by Alistair Moffat

  But there turned out to be compensations. Like all the best English villages, Etal has an excellent tearoom. Tired after thrashing my way along the Till, and at least three hours since my salmon sandwiches, I sat down gratefully with a pot of tea, a fruit scone and small jars of clotted cream and raspberry jam. Even though the waitress had microwaved the scone to warm it up, thus rendering its texture indistinguishable from foam rubber, it was all delightful and very welcome.

  A warm afternoon was becoming a beautiful evening and, refreshed by an hour in the garden of the tearoom, I decided to leave the banks of the Till and walk eastwards. Not far from Etal, and down a shady B road, lies another model village.

  After 1860, Ford was almost entirely rebuilt by its owner, Lady Waterford, as a memorial to her husband, who had died in a riding accident. In front of a group of substantial houses and a well-made village hall, the widow had a dramatic monument erected. On a smooth, marble column a large and slightly menacing angel stands, his wings folded behind him in such a way as to reach the same height as his head. I felt he might swoop down at any moment, like a celestial Batman.

  Ford Castle is much older than the village and much rebuilt. It played a central role in perhaps the greatest historical drama to play out in this quiet and pretty part of north Northumberland. In September 1513, James IV mustered what may have been the largest army ever to march out of Scotland. Allied to France against England, the young king saw an opportunity. Henry VIII’s army had taken the towns of Tournai and Therouanne, and the French implored James ‘to advance a yard into England’ and open a second front. Perhaps 30,000 soldiers forded the Tweed at Norham, took the castle of the prince-bishops and moved south to Etal and Ford. Their castles surrendered and James IV made his headquarters at Ford, where it was said he spent too much time in the company of its keeper, the beautiful Lady Heron.

  Meanwhile the Earl of Surrey raised an army in the northern counties, taking the Banner of St Cuthbert from Durham Cathedral as a rallying point. His forces mustered at Alnwick and a curious diplomatic exchange began. Couched in the elaborate language of chivalry, Surrey sent the Rougemont Pursuivant herald to the Scottish camp at Ford with a message. With great politeness, the English general enquired if the Scottish king was prepared to do battle on 9 September and were the hours between 12 noon and 3 p.m. convenient? The Islay herald was despatched to the English camp with an equally polite message, saying that these arrangements were agreeable.

  On the morning of 9 September, James IV led the Scots from Ford Castle and they crossed the Till to occupy a fortified hilltop position at Flodden. Lookouts saw the English begin to advance from the south-east. Marching in three battalions, they halted, formed up on the Milfield Plain and pitched camp at Barmoor, an elevated site that offered good visibility in all directions. At that point Surrey learned of the heavily defended position of the Scots at Flodden and was not pleased. He sent the Rougemont Pursuivant with a less polite message. His proposal was that the armies should fight on open ground, on the Milfield Plain. But James IV would have none of it; he refused to allow the English herald into his presence and sent a message to Surrey he was a king and would do as he pleased. At that moment, all of the niceties of late medieval diplomacy were jettisoned and military realities took over.

  The English army then began to move, but not towards the Scottish position. Instead they marched north to the Tweed and for some time James IV thought they were leaving the field. But before they reached the river the English suddenly swung westwards and crossed the Till, the vanguard and the artillery rumbled over the new bridge at Twizel, while the bulk of the army splashed over at Straw Ford, the place where I had been eating my sandwiches. The seventy-year-old Earl of Surrey was outflanking and out-thinking the young Scottish king by leading his army north of his position, thereby cutting off any possibility of retreat back to Scotland. The old warrior must have been confident.

  As soon as his manoeuvres were complete, Surrey saw an opportunity. Using his more flexible and more sophisticated field artillery, his gunners began to rake the Scottish ranks, and the more ponderous Scottish siege guns could make no effective reply. James IV had no option but to advance from his position of strength on Branxton Hill. And then everything went disastrously wrong.

  Positioned in the van of his men, perhaps near the front ranks, charging on foot, the Scottish king ran down the hill and tore into the thick of the English halberdiers. The Spanish ambassador, Pedro de Ayala, later wrote ‘he is not a good captain because he begins to fight before he has given his orders’.

  But James’s immense physical courage almost succeeded because his battalion pushed, hacked and bludgeoned to within a spear’s length of breaking through the English lines, reaching very close to the position of the Earl of Surrey. He sat on horseback in the rear ranks so that he could see how the fighting ebbed and flowed and give orders to reinforce, pull back or attack. As the battle descended into a melee of desperate hand-to-hand fighting and the ruck of battle closed in, James was on foot and in no position to command, unable to see further than the desperate struggles around him. After some hours of exhausting combat, the king’s battalion was rolled up and surrounded and, with many of his noblemen, James was killed.

  On my way home from Ford and a day on the banks of the Till, I drove to the site of the battle, the place where five hundred years before almost fifteen thousand men died. And for many it was a slow, agonising death. Blows from bladed weapons rarely killed outright and many will have lain for hours badly wounded on the battlefield, passing in and out of consciousness, slowly bleeding to death. There is a monument close to where the battle was fought, but nothing more to remember all of the terrible slaughter that took place. As the sun dipped behind the Cheviots, I found that my imagination failed me. All I could do was bless the historical accident that my generation had not been forced to face a war and all that shocking, savage waste of life.

  When I arrived home, these dark thoughts instantly fled. There was some late sun and Kim had brought out our granddaughter Grace for a walk before bedtime. The wee lass could not get outside enough and her parents had had to buy her a sunhat for the summer of summers. We went down to the stable yard to see the horses, sleepy after their hard feed, and then over to some shrubs where the bees were still busy. They fascinated her. Hearing the distant drone of engines, we looked up to see an aeroplane flying southeast, its silver undercarriage brilliantly lit by the low sun. When I told Grace to look up, she saw it, and after a moment the wee girl waved. I am not at all sure why, but I felt tears come and hastily blew my nose. It may have been the impossible innocence, and the scale. A tiny toddler holding her grandpa’s hand and waving at a huge machine thundering across the face of the earth.

  Our farm is a place full of memory, the deposit of centuries of experience, but it also lives in the present and will change in the future. The landscape and its animals make demands, and these force Lindsay and I to cope and adapt. With Grace, it will be different. She is the first child of this farm for many years, and through her eyes we will see it fresh and new. I look forward to her racing around with the dogs (the term ‘dodos’ coined by Grace will be cast aside as baby talk, used by no one except me), helping with the daily chores, sitting next to me in the pick-up and telling me her story of this place. I hope there will be years enough for it to be a long story.

  7

  Wandering

  The following morning I set out for the wild up-country of north Northumberland, where I believe Cuthbert went to open his heart to God, where he would pray and keep silent, listening for whispers of revelation on the ever-present wind. The maps of Doddington and Ford moors are speckled with memories of the saint, some of them long-standing and more persistent than mere tradition. Cuddy was an affectionate nickname for Cuthbert and on that bright morning I set out to find Cuddy’s Cave, a place where he is said to have prayed and sought refuge.

  The course of the Till led me to a very striking outcrop of roc
k on the flanks of Dod Law, where the land rose steeply and the moorland began. Poking out of the hillside, it looked like the corner tower of a vast submerged stone fortress. After my usual difficulties with high barbed-wire fences, I climbed up the steep slope to be astonished. The vista to the west was vast, completely unexpected. I could make out landmarks that were many miles distant. Across the Milfield Plain, where the Earl of Surrey had preferred to do battle with James IV, the eastern ranges of the Cheviots petered out in the low hills above Wooler, and due west, the conspicuous rounded hump of Yeavering Bell stood out clearly against the horizon. Beyond that, the hills faded in the haze of a sunny morning. When Cuthbert came across this great rock, the panorama will have meant much more than scenery to him.

  When I reached the outcrop, I found a small cave with a wind-buffed entrance that was almost perfectly semi-circular, like a round-headed window. If Cuddy did indeed seek shelter in this shallow cave, he could not have done much more than sleep there. I crawled in and could barely sit up, although there was welcome relief from the breeze, even though the open entrance is wide. But it was only when I climbed to the top of the crag that I understood why this place would have attracted Cuthbert.

  Jutting out from the hillside, commanding wide and long views, this was a place to pray and a place where God could see His servant searching the sky, arms aloft for His grace. And for Cuthbert, his intimate knowledge of the New Testament guided his actions and attitudes as he knelt on the rock, gazing out over the plain and the hills. Christ’s Last Temptation took place on a mountain from where He could see all the nations of the world and where Satan tested Him with the promise of secular power. On his mountain, Cuthbert will have drawn strength from Jesus’ example as he fought his demons.

  About five miles to the west, at the foot of Yeavering Bell, lay Ad Gefrin, a Northumbrian royal palace and a focus of secular power in the second half of the seventh century, the sort of power Satan dangled before Christ. In its timber halls kings gave judgements, held councils and feasted with their warriors. Close by stood a remarkable structure that was probably used by royal officials, perhaps priests, perhaps the king himself. Known as the Grandstand, it was made from wooden beams and resembled a wedge cut from an amphitheatre. Tiered seating rose up in a triangle from a focal point on the ground, where orders were given by someone in authority. In a pre-literate society, it was vital that important people such as noblemen all heard the same thing at the same time.

  On still days, Cuthbert will have seen the smoke of cooking fires rising from the royal palace at Yeavering and also from the rich farmland of the banks of the Till and its tributaries. On top of the crag, the winds of many millennia have carved curious wave-like grooves in the rock, but one of them might have looked providential. On the edge of the flat summit of the crag a small rainwater pool has formed, surely put there by the hand of Almighty God and filled with His holy rain so that Cuthbert could both drink and bless himself.

  Following sheepwalks and the occasional track, I climbed above Cuddy’s Cave and looked over to the wastes of Doddington and Horton Moors, a bleak landscape but a place that had once been touched by the gods. The map is speckled with what prehistorians call rock art, mostly cup and ring marks chiselled on outcrops of bedrock. Their precise function will never be understood, but the presence of at least nine sites of rock art, as well as a stone circle, enclosures and other signs of prehistoric settlement within less than a square mile means that this moorland was thought to be close to the gods long before Cuthbert walked there.

  When shepherds saw him in the hills, they will have wondered at the identity of the wanderer before they could get close enough to see the tonsure that marked Cuthbert as a monk and not a fugitive or a madman. As he passed his days and nights in prayer, fasting and keeping vigil under the open, starry skies, living a life of solitude in the deserts of moss and tussock, it may be that farmers and herdsmen gave the holy man gifts of food, ewes’ milk and perhaps sheepskins to ease his shivering sleep in the little cave and other rocky shelters. They will have known that he was praying for their salvation as well as his own, and interceding with God to send good weather and bountiful harvests. When Cuthbert later retreated to Inner Farne, both Bede and the Anonymous biographer detailed the provisions he made to feed himself, and even up on the high moors he will have considered how to survive. He had no land to grow anything, and it is likely that he depended on the charity of the countryside and its people. Perhaps they conferred the place-names that seem to remember his wanderings: Cuddy’s Knowe, St Cuthbert’s Grove, Cuddy’s Well, Cuddy’s Cave and others.

  Attitudes to those who roam, live outdoors and shiver under the stars have fluctuated and my own ambivalent views were brought home to me at the beginning of the bitter winter of 2017–18 when I took my dog out for a walk early one morning. It was a luminous piece of orange plastic sheeting that alerted us to something that did not look right in the corner of the Haining Wood, where the gate opens into the Deer Park. When the sheet moved, Maidie started barking and bouncing. Then the shape of a man sitting behind the trunk of one of the stand of sweet poplars became clear. As we approached, he hailed me and said how much he liked the dog, even though it was growling at him. This greeting undammed a torrent of talk that moved between grand political conspiracy and the malign nature of society in general before swerving swiftly and seamlessly to the beneficial, health-giving properties of live yoghurt, especially when mixed with turmeric and Chinese spices.

  Clearly well educated and equally clearly unstable, this man had slept the night in the woods, using the orange sheet to stay dry. Wrapped around his legs was a sleeping bag and he wore what looked like a new and clean padded navy jacket. He had pulled its hood up and was eating something from what looked like a cream cheese carton, the silver foil turned back. When I asked him (in the moments when he took a breath from ranting about the closure of a hostel in Edinburgh) which way he had come, he pointed to the dense woods behind him. Having shown him where the strands of the electric fencing ran, and not wanting him to hurt himself, I suggested he go back the way he had come.

  I didn’t think he was dangerous, except perhaps to himself, nor would injure or spook the animals, but I am no expert. He must lead a harsh and lonely life, and I felt sad that I was weighing him as a potential threat, suggesting he go back the way he came in part because I did not want him to see where we lived. If I had had any cash on me, I would have given it to him. He seemed older, perhaps in his fifties, although it was hard to tell with his hood hiding his hair. Hoods can make people look sinister. I called my neighbour at Middlestead Farm, Andy White, and he said he would check on him. I told Adam to lock all the doors. ‘If tonight is cold or wet, the man might seek some shelter.’ Later, I decided to go up and have a look for myself. I took some cash, but he had gone. There was no trace of him, not even an area where the grass had been flattened. I wondered what he did with his days. Perhaps the grim business of survival constantly occupied his thoughts and actions. In the snows, rains and icy winds of the bitter winter that followed, I sometimes thought about the wanderer who slept in the Haining Wood.

  The night before I left to complete the last part of my journey with Cuthbert, I sat down with my maps and traced a route to the Kyloe Hills and St Cuthbert’s Cave, a place where the monks fleeing from the Viking and Danish raids on Lindisfarne were said to have sheltered with his coffin and all of their relics. From there I planned to walk the St Cuthbert’s Way to the coast and then cross the causeway to the Island of Tides. My calculation of the distance, the difficulty of the terrain and the time it would take to walk had to be precise because if I missed the safe crossing times, Lindisfarne would become an unreachable island and I would be stranded on the mainland.

  My original intention had been to hire a campervan for a week, park it on Lindisfarne as somewhere I could sleep, write and, most importantly, be alone. But just as in 1965, camping of any sort was not permitted and so I was forced to book into
a hotel. All of the self-catering accommodation seemed to be taken or far too expensive for just one person, but the hotel I chose had no bar or public area. That probably meant it would be quiet.

  With enough clothing to last a week, maps, notebooks and other essential bits and pieces, my rucksack was full to bursting – and heavy. Given all of my tedious frailties, I wondered if my walking pace would be significantly slowed. I resolved to stop only when I wanted to take photographs with my phone.

  From the maps, the village of Holburn looked like a good place to begin the last part of my journey. A sign attached to a blue door on a small, hut-like building encouraged me. It read:

  Holburn Water Supply Trust. Built after a long debate and much wine by the cooperation of all the Holburn villagers. Aqua Vincit Omnia. Rusticemur et Bibeamus, 1996.

  It made me smile. At our farm we have a private water supply that has recently been threatened by a developer, and discussions with our neighbours who share the system (councils of war, more like) have often been fuelled by wine. A bit too smugly I noted that ‘bibeamus’ had been misspelled with an unnecessary vowel wandering into the first person plural. It means ‘Let us drink’.

  Curious as to why I had been curious about the sign, a villager who had been working in his garden approached. ‘Are you walking to St Cuthbert’s Cave?’ His advice on the best and most scenic route turned out to be excellent and I walked past the dozen or so houses in Holburn on what was becoming a bright and warm morning. The main watershed ridge of the Kyloe Hills runs approximately south to north and beyond lies the coastal plain and Lindisfarne. As I walked closer I could see a series of shelved rocky outcrops with gaps and overhangs between them. One was pierced by a door-shaped cleft large enough to enter and it occurred to me that Cuthbert could have sheltered from the wind and rain in several places. The landward side of the ridge also backed into the prevailing wind.