To the Island of Tides. Alistair Moffat

after summer rain, the scents of the land were released: the musky smell of wet earth, the bitterness of leaves battered off twigs and branches by the huge raindrops, and the puddles on the tracks filled with the metallic whiff of silt and grit, which was dust only twelve hours before. More, less dramatic, rain was forecast for later in the day, but I decided to risk getting wet and to make a sustained start on the first few steps of my pilgrimage, my journey in Cuthbert’s long shadow. His vision on Brotherstone Hill had deepened the young man’s piety and ultimately persuaded him to go to Old Melrose to seek admission to the community, to become a novice monk.

      Since I wanted to walk where he had walked, see something of what he had seen, I needed to work out the route of Cuthbert’s journey from Wrangham to the monastery, what were probably the most fateful, life-changing steps he was ever to take. Always as a historian I have tried to imagine how people thought at the time and what prompted them to act as they did in the past, avoiding the attachment of modern motives and attitudes, thereby not falling into the trap of reading history backwards. Neither Robert Bruce nor Edward II of England knew how events at Bannockburn would fall out and the fact that we do should not colour the telling of the story of the battle. Nothing was inevitable.

      So it was with all of the actors in our history. As he made his way between the hedges and looked out over the river valleys of his childhood, Cuthbert did not know where his decision to become a monk would take him, or indeed that the monastery would even admit him. Bede recounts something surprising. Instead of walking, showing some humility in imitation of Christ and the Apostles, Cuthbert rode high on his horse, carrying a spear, and with a servant walking beside him. This detail certainly marks him out as an aristocrat of some degree, but it is difficult to believe that he was armed on account of the countryside between Wrangham and Old Melrose being hostile, these fields and lanes he must have known so well. It seems much more likely he was showing off his status. Lack of self-confidence and uncertainty might have prompted him to think on all manner of possibilities: that his journey was a final taste of freedom, the last time he would look over the fields as a free man before he gave his life to God. And I am sure he wondered how strong his commitment was. Perhaps floating at the back of his mind was the possibility of rejection – either a change of mind on his part or a refusal of the monks to admit him.

      This is a pivotal moment in Cuthbert’s story and it is worth quoting the relevant passage at length from Bede’s Life. His characteristically precise and crisp monastic Latin makes a difficult journey sound rather too smooth and inevitable, but Bede’s business was more than historical. He wanted to establish the cult of St Cuthbert and no doubts or blemishes could be admitted in the story of the holy man’s exemplary life. Bede was not so much reading history backwards as making sure it travelled in a straight line and in the right direction:

      Meanwhile the reverend servant of the Lord, having forsaken the things of the world, hastens to submit to monastic discipline, since he had been urged by the heavenly vision to seek the joys of eternal bliss and to endure temporal hunger and thirst for the Lord’s sake as one who had been invited to the heavenly feasts. And though he knew that the church at Lindisfarne contained many holy men by whose learning and example he might be instructed, yet learning beforehand of the fame of the sublime virtues of the monk and priest Boisil, he preferred to seek Melrose. And by chance it happened that, having jumped down from his horse on reaching the monastery, and being about to enter the church to pray, he gave both his horse and the spear he was holding to a servant, for he had not yet put off his secular habit.

      Ignoring modern roads and remembering that in the seventh century there were no bridges over the Tweed or the Leader (not since the Romans abandoned their great military depot at Trimontium, at the foot of the Eildon Hills), I had pored over large-scale Ordnance Survey maps, the excellent Pathfinder series in particular, looking for traces of disused tracks, and also consulted as many old maps as I could find. In order to reach Old Melrose, I had concluded that Cuthbert had had to go south-east from Wrangham to wade with his horse and servant across the Tweed at the Monksford, an ancient crossing about a mile south of the monastery.

      From Brotherstone Farm, an old C road led to the hamlet of Bemersyde on a ridge above the river’s floodplain. And, from there, I reckoned the route turned south and downhill to Dryburgh, where the romantic ruins of a twelfth-century abbey now stand. From there, Cuthbert would have followed the banks of the Tweed north to the ford. That made sense to me, as the most likely path. And when I was checking my maps one last time before packing them in my rucksack, I noticed that a solitary ash tree had been plotted on the Pathfinder by the side of the road, about four or five hundred yards east of Brotherstone Farm. I wondered if this was a relic of the row of ash trees pointed out by the Rev. W.L. Sime and the Berwickshire Naturalists’ Club in the summer of 1930.

      By the time I shouldered my pack (spare socks, pants, a towel, a waterproof, a copy of Colgrave’s translation of the Anonymous Life and Bede’s version, maps, a spare pen and notebook, a fully charged mobile phone, cheese sandwiches, chocolate and a hat) and gone off to look for the ash tree, the sun had climbed and my body warmer quickly became too warm. Despite walking back and forth on the road, consulting reference points on my two overlapping Pathfinders and searching amongst the thickly overgrown hedgerows and field-ends, I could find no sign of the ash tree, or even its stump, and retraced my steps to the farm and the C road, disappointed at a false start, something I had already experienced at Brotherstone.

      Almost immediately, I knew that this was an ancient route. When the fraying tarmac swung west at Third Farm, the track grew narrow, made not for modern vehicles but for carts, riders and those on foot. On either side were heavily overgrown but deep ditches, dug to catch the rainwater run-off, and in the middle were the intermittent remains of a crest. Between the ditches and the fields ran long avenues of very old hardwood trees. Some had been blackened by lightning strikes, others had lost their heartwood and were regrowing around the edges, or had sent out suckers or seedlings. The hedges between the trees were broad and very dense, good winter shelter for small animals and birds, and full of summer and autumn goodness, with their harvest of rosehips, wild raspberries, brambles and haws of several sorts. It was impossible to see through the thick branches and abundant foliage.

      From the farm at Third, the old road began to climb gently and through field entries I could see long, sunlit vistas to the south, the Tweed and Teviot valleys and beyond them, the watershed ridge of the Cheviots. I met no one on the road, and no farm traffic. The landscape seemed to doze in the sun and, as I began the metronomic rhythm of putting one foot in front of another, my senses began to drift, absorbing little more than the warmth, the scents of the land and its summer glories. On both sides barley fields stretched across undulating, free-draining ground, the ripening, heavy heads rippling in the breeze. Near the top of the rise I had been steadily climbing, the old road crossed a green loaning, a wide path that ran south to north. It had probably been used for driving flocks and herds to the high summer pasture on the flanks of the Bemersyde, Brotherstone and Redpath hills. Its hedges had not been trimmed for many years and the hot summer had seen them soar in height like rows of small trees. As I breathed the clean air, taking my time through this place of, it seemed, complete peace, I wondered why Cuthbert wanted to leave it for the seclusion and austerity of life at Old Melrose. Was there turmoil in his soul? Why was this not enough?

      Later in his brief account of Cuthbert’s journey to Old Melrose, Bede described his motivation in a single phrase, ‘he preferred the monastery to the world’. With his servant walking beside him, his horse’s reins in one hand and his spear in the other, the young man, perhaps only fifteen or sixteen years old, presented the perfect picture of the secular, even warlike world. In the Anonymous Life reference is made to Cuthbert at one time ‘dwelling in camp with the army’, probably having been conscripted into the royal Northumbrian host. But he was about to cast aside his spear, hand over his horse to his servant and leave the world ‘for the yoke of bondservice to Christ’. The young man would soon pass from the familiar patchwork of fields, farms and villages and cross into the sacred land.

      If I was right about Cuthbert’s road to meet his destiny, it took him through the ancient hamlet of Bemersyde. No trace of the early medieval village is left, but the origins of its name point to real antiquity. It means something like ‘the hillside where bitterns call’, birds that have been described as the Trumpeters