Walking to Holy Island

It sits on the edge of the Northumbrian coast, an intermittent island joined twice a day to the mainland by the tides, before retreating into isolation once more. It lies low, save for a plug of rock on the eastern side, on which sits a small, sixteenth-century castle. The island is viewable down much of the coastline, haunting the observer as a marker of extraordinariness, an eye looking out on all we are and all we have become.

Lindisfarne, or Holy Island (technically speaking the name of the civil parish), was once the centre of western world. So Kevin Crossley-Holland argues in Pieces of Land: Journeys to Eight Islands, noting that a mere thirty years after Celtic monk Aidan arrived on the island and established a monastery, Lindisfarne for a time became

the nerve centre of Christianity, not only in Northumbria, not only in England, but in Northern Europe. Indeed, perhaps it is fair to claim that at this moment the centre of European civilisation – once Athens, once Rome, once Alexandria – for the first time moved north of the Alps, far north, and resided in Northumbria.

Aidan, previously based at the Scottish island of Iona, arrived on the island around AD 634. He had been invited by Oswald, King of Northumbria, to form a Christian community, and the uninhabited island best suited the monk’s purposes. A monastery and an abbey were built and an establishment was formed of extraordinary energy, piety and influence. Its power and creativity are well-documented. The reason for the success may lie in words recorded by Bede (historian of the English church and a visitor to Lindisfarne). The legend is that they were the words of a counsellor to King Edwin, in whose reign Christianity was introduced to Northumbria in 627:

Your Majesty, when we compare the present life of man on earth with that time of which we have no knowledge, it seems to me like the swift flight of a single sparrow through the banqueting-hall where you sit in the winter months to dine with your thanes and counsellors. Inside there is a comforting fire to warm the room; outside, the wintry storms of snow and rain are raging. This sparrow flies swiftly in through one door of the hall, and out through another. While he is inside, he is safe from the winter storms; but after a few moments of comfort, he vanishes from sight into the darkness whence he came. Similarly, man appears on earth for a little while; but we know nothing of what went before this life, and what follows. Therefore if this new teaching can reveal any more certain knowledge, it seems only right that we should follow it.

There is perhaps no more eloquent a statement to explain why the new religion enjoyed the spread that it did. As Crossley-Holland puts it, “something of the electrifying hope which Christianity must have inspired in a world dominated by wyrd, implacable fate, is apparent in these words”. It proclaimed that it knew from where the sparrow had come, where it was flying to, and why.

Lindisfarne was not only a powerhouse of missionary endeavour but a place of culture and learning. Many must make the journey to Holy Island because here was the place where the Lindisfarne Gospels were created, one of the artistic wonders of our world. Some must travel to the island in the hope of seeing those Gospels, only to be disappointed to learn that they are usually housed in the Treasures Gallery of the British Library in London:

Then came anarchy. In 793 the Vikings arrived, at the start of what would be three hundred years of conflict between these war-faring peoples from across the North Sea, and the Anglo-Saxons. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle records the terrible day:

AD 793. This year came dreadful fore-warnings over the land of the Northumbrians, terrifying the people most woefully: these were immense sheets of light rushing through the air, and whirlwinds, and fiery dragons flying across the firmament. These tremendous tokens were soon followed by a great famine: and not long after, on the sixth day before the ides of January in the same year, the harrowing inroads of heathen men made lamentable havoc in the church of God in Holy-island, by rapine and slaughter.

Lindisfarne survived. The raids were intermittent, and though the surviving monks would return to find all destroyed and all treasures plundered, they would rebuild. Crucially, they carried away the coffin of St Cuthbert, abbot of the monastery, whose body was carried across the north of England for many years (resulting in a host of St Cuthbert churches being founded or renamed where the cortege stopped), before finding his final resting place in 999 at Durham, where the monks built a cathedral. Cuthbert’s supposedly uncorrupted body and miracles associated with him created a powerful cult and made Lindisfarne a enduring place of pilgrimage.

For centuries those pilgrims crossed the waters to Lindisfarne while the tide was out, or were rowed across. In 1954 a low tarmac causeway was built that enabled motor traffic to reach the island when the waters receded, transforming it into a tourist haven. The cars and coaches now trundle across during the permitted hours. But to be a pilgrim the only way to approach Lindisfarne is by the purest method followed for all those centuries, which is walking across. Called The Pilgrim’s Way, or Pilgrim’s Path, the three-mile route is a straight line over the sands and mudlfats, from the start of the causeway, proceeding from the right-hand side as you face the island. The line is marked out with a long row of tall poles. Two cabins on stilts with a ladder beneath are there for those who head out, find themselves trapped by the tides, and need to escape. On average one car per month gets stranded on the causeway as the waters return, requiring the Coastguard to come to the rescue. Modern figures for walkers caught out by the waters would seem to be negligible.

Naturally you can only undertake the walk while the tide is out. There are two such windows per day, for which you need to consult the tide tables and make sure that you follow the correct times for walkers rather than drivers. The other essential aspect is that you walk the Way barefoot. Though you can use wellingtons or walking boots, the going would be tough and soggy across the muddy shoals and shallow stretches of water – and to be a pilgrim you would want to be barefoot in any case. You are heading to Holy Island in the footsteps of the monks, after all.

So you press ahead, over mudbanks, occasional pools of water, clumps of seaweed. There is little to harm the barefooted, bar the occasional shell if you are not watchful. The silence is exhilarating, until suddenly there is no silence. An eerie, keening sound that at first seemed to resemble a motorbike rally or some industrial works on the mainland, filled the air as we crossed. But who would be holding a motorbike rally at 9am on a Monday morning? Or was it some peculiar effect of the wind blowing down the channel between land an island? Only gradually did the source become apparent – a distant mudbank laden with hundreds of seals, calling out as they must have called out for centuries. The monks must have heard the seals so often that they became indifferent to the unearthly background noise coming across the waters.

There is something profoundly satisfying about walking where waters have receded. It’s partly the recollection of childhood wading at seaside beaches. It’s partly a feeling of being reconnected to the earth. It’s an ancient feeling, of walking out to new lands, the need to be questing. And it is nice to feel the water between your toes.

The walk took us forty-three minutes (guides to the area suggest a cautious seventy-five minutes for those walking across). Coming upon dry land and donning footwear once more, you follow the path along the tarmac rood, past the sign saying ‘Welcome to Holy Island’. And there you are.

Lindisfarne is well described by Kevin Crossley-Holland, whose 1972 book Pieces of Eight I have used as the backbone of this post. It is a travel book of a literary kind that takes the British isles of Hoy, St Agnes, Lindisfarne, Tory, Alderney, Eigg, Lundy and Inishmore to form an exploration of the idea of islands at a time of cultural change: their history, their geography, their people, and their meaning to any of us, whether traveller, inhabitant or dreamer. It is one of the finest books that I, as an amateur connoisseur of islands, have read on the subject, particularly for its astute blend of romanticism and anti-romanticism.

Thus he can paint a picture of the island in lines that would make pilgrims of any of us:

Because the Anglo-Saxons fascinate me and because I have translated much Old English poetry, I approached the Holy Island of Lindisfarne with some reverence. Coming to it north from Newcastle, south from Berwick, or over the backs of the Cheviots, the first sight of it always fills me with longings. Beyond the shining Slakes it lies, not far off and yet remote, an axe-shaped island; undemanding sand dunes patched with marram, at one end a huddled village, the Priory ruins, the castle capping a great outcrop of whinstone … Lindisfarne is a kind of Mecca, a Canterbury of the North, the brilliant focal point of a brilliant age ….

Then, in taking us through the island and its history, Crossley-Holland homes in on the inhabitants, newly confronted as they had been by the onrush of tourists following the building of the causeway. While understanding of the pressures of change, a gentle man is startlingly blunt about what he witnesses:

Without making concessions to speak of by way of amenities, the islanders have discovered that they can make a living out of tourism. But the price they, in turn, have to pay is the sacrifice of privacy and a threatened identity. All too often their reaction, their defence is to be dour, or summary, or inflexible, or humourless, or gratuitously rude – behaviour totally unlike that on any other island I have visited.

What made the islanders so? Maybe there’s a hint of their brutal ancestors, people who in past centuries had gleefully lured ships on the rocks to plunder them. The local industry then turned to fishing and lime kilns, but modern boats from the mainland and new practices destroyed such business and the island retreated into a place with no purpose – from the inhabitants’ perspective – until the tourists arrived.

We don’t know much about the people of Aidan and Cuthbert’s time, naturally enough. They would have tilled the fields, fished, found employment in various ways about the monastery, and prayed for shipwrecks. They led the island life, which is to be firmly independent of the mainland, yet wholly dependent at the same time. Lindisfarne’s oddity, which may have infected its inhabitants until Crossley-Holland’s time, was to be tied to an island that was not an island, twice a day that is. They were joined and unjoined.

Visitors to the islands will find no such hostility these days. Lindisfarne has an almost entirely floating population in any case, its workers coming from across the country (and beyond). They are unfailingly welcoming. You the pilgrim can see the ruins of the priory (built in the twelfth century, long after Aidan’s time); the still active twelfth-century St Mary’s church; the small but evocative museum with visitor centre; the stone-walled Gertrude Jekyll garden; the quaint castle, refashioned in Arts and Crafts style in the early twentieth century by Edwin Lutyens to suit the whims of its businessman owner, Edward Hudson; and the salt marshes and dunes of the the Lindisfarne National Nature Reserve. There is the village, with its pubs, cafes, some homes, boats, and a few shops.

Lindisfarne’s odd elements do not quite cohere into a single idea, while the continual crowds (until the tides close in for the evening) may detract from the romantic dream of the isolated outpost that stood for what was civilised in a dark world. But the dream lies in the journey as much as the destination. It is the going there that must draw us – away from the tarmac, instead walking barefoot across the mudflats and shoals, as the waters permit. Lindisfarne reminds us of the importance of journeying, as much as the belief in a place worth journeying towards.

Links:

• The Holy Island of Lindisfarne website has all the basic information needed on its attractions, services, and accommodation
• There is an excellent guide to walking the Pilgrim’s Way to Lindisfarne, including all of the safety notices, on the Bellvue Guesthouse Holy Island site. Anyone planning to walk, or drive a ross to Lindisfarne should take care to check the times of the tides and the guidelines provided to ensure a safe crossing
• Pieces of Eight: Journeys to Eight Islands, published in 1972, is long out of print, but there is plenty of information on the work of author, poet and translator Kevin Crossley-Holland at https://www.kevincrossley-holland.com