Lindisfarne

When the tide goes out at Lindisfarne I become a pilgrim and a time traveller. When you feel the liquid sand and mud between bare toes where St Cuthbert once walked you too will become a pilgrim.

Since Cuthbert’s time (AD 670) this tiny island - occupying just 1,000 acres off the coast of Northumberland - has inspired soldiers, priests, fishermen, writers, artists, architects, gardeners, filmmakers and plain trampers like me.

Have you ever wondered why so many of us tramp (v. walk firmly; walk, go on foot. v.t. perform journey, traverse country, on foot)? I do often. I did when I stood at the top of Uluru (Ayers’ Rock) in the Northern Territories of Australia, especially after being admonished by a wife sensitive to the wishes of the indigenous people who prefer visitors do not climb. I did when half way across northern England on The Coast to Coast, caught in a rainstorm at Keld. I did on the summit of Ben Nevis in a near whiteout on 4^th June for heaven’s sake. So why do it? The answer is landscape, culture and people.

With wife Liza, sister-in-law Mary and her husband T.K. I walked in Cuthbert’s footsteps in 2003. The 60-mile Way crosses the Eildon and Cheviot Hills, winds with the River Tweed and concludes with crossing the sands to Lindisfarne by a line of posts marking the Pilgrims Route. The modern statue of St Aidan within the ruins of Lindisfarne Abbey is the symbolic end of St Cuthbert’s Way.

An intrepid tramper

In Beal, the tiny village overlooking the causeway to 
Lindisfarne, I looked over the sands on the last morning of our expedition. I smelled pine trees, heard the plaintive call of the seagulls and imagined how Cuthbert must have felt thirteen hundred years ago. Cuthbert and I will have found pretty much the same view, excepting I have the castle. Peace and serenity abounded then as it still does today. The early scholars thought the peace was good but the serenity was fragile. So they moved their base to Durham, to put Northumberland between themselves and the unpredictable noisy, northern neighbours. The island thus escaped ‘development’. Apart from the active years of the castle (1570 to 1603) Lindisfarne has remained in the hands of fishermen and travellers.

I’ll not bore readers with a lengthy history of Lindisfarne, (or Holy Island), save only to say that St Aidan founded a monastery here in 635. St Cuthbert, in my book a great man, became prior around 675. The troublesome Vikings sacked it the 875. The Benedictines of Durham started the current abbey in the 11^th century. A castle was built in 1549 – to keep at bay more pesky invaders, the Scots. And in 1902 another great man arrived to turn the castle ruins into a house; that man was Edwin Lutyens.

Lindisfarne fills me with wonder. I am compelled to revisit every few years. The landscape here plays with all my senses. I care about places like this and their preservation for the next generation of fishermen and future travellers. One such past traveller was Edward Hudson, the founder of Country Life magazine. In 1901, whilst holidaying in the area, he discovered the neglected castle remains. He hired his favourite architect, Edwin Lutyens, to convert it to a private home.

Lutyens is my quintessential English architect and a man of vision whose buildings express cool English emotion yet also a pronounced durability. Lutyen’s Thiepval memorial to the missing on the Somme (see August 2016 blog), Castle Drogo in Devon and Lindisfarne Castle each serve a purpose that resounds as strongly today as when he designed them. The landscapes with the buildings he created in them became fused focal points that lay down a lineage that has attracted succeeding generations of visitors.

This constant and febrile joining of land and history on Lindisfarne influenced others that followed Cuthbert and Hudson. It was instinctive for Lutyens and Hudson to ask Gertrude Jekyll in 1906 to redesign the planting of the atmospheric Walled Garden north of the castle. In 1966 the brilliant filmmaker Roman Polanski shot Cul-de-Sac totally on location on the island and used the castle for many of the scenes. The mercurial lead actor Donald Pleasance, known to many as Blofeld in an early James Bond film, spends much of the duration in this bizarre film dressed in only a pink nightie. (Movie fans not familiar with early Polanski work will be captivated). Poets Sir Walter Scott and Tony Harrison and novelists including Melvyn Bragg, George R.R. Martin and Bernard Cornwell have all felt the drama and mysticism of the island.

Gertrude Jekyll's garden

There is another long distance walking trail that starts on Lindisfarne. This is St Oswald’s Way. I therefore felt an innate impulse that we should return to the island and once more be pilgrims. We wanted to feel the slimy sand between our toes as we crossed the Way and get lost once again in the inescapable Northumberland littoral.

If you would like to share your experiences of the places discussed in this blog please record them in the Comments section.

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