To the Island of Tides. Alistair Moffat
eighth year until manhood, when he entered the service of God. For this reason he called her mother and often visited her. He came on a certain day to the village in which she lived, called Hruringaham; on that occasion a house was seen to be on fire on the eastern edge of the village and from the same direction a very strong wind was blowing, causing a conflagration.
Cuthbert fell to the ground and began to pray, and miraculously the wind began to blow from the west and the rest of the village was saved. Over time, the place-name of Hruringaham was rubbed smooth into Wrangham and, to add to the findings of the Berwickshire Naturalists, archaeologists have more recently detected the remains of an ancient village near the modern farm of Brotherstone on the slopes of the Brotherstone Hills above the road between Kelso and Melrose.
Here is another description of a miraculous event from the Anonymous Life:
On another occasion, also in his youth, while he was still leading a secular life, and was feeding the flocks of his master on the hills near the river which is called the Leader, in the company of other shepherds, he was spending the night in vigils according to his custom, offering abundant prayers with pure faith and a faithful heart, when he saw a vision which the Lord revealed to him. For through the opened heaven – not by a parting asunder of the natural elements but by the sight of his spiritual eyes – like blessed Jacob the patriarch in Luz which was called Bethel, he had seen angels ascending and descending and in their hands was borne to heaven a holy soul, as if in a globe of fire. Then immediately awakening the shepherds, he described the wonderful vision just as he had seen it, prophesying further to them that it was the soul of a most holy bishop or of some other great person. And so events proved; for a few days afterwards, they heard that the death of our holy bishop Aidan, at that same hour of the night as he had seen the vision, had been announced far and wide.
What Cuthbert saw, and whether or not it really was a miracle rather than a meteorological event, seemed much less important to me than where he saw it. From all that I had read and researched, it was clear that he had been raised at Brotherstone/Wrangham, not far from the junction of the River Leader with the Tweed, and that he had had a remarkable, transcendent experience, probably in the Brotherstone Hills.
In 2000, I first became interested in Cuthbert when I was writing what I hoped would be a definitive history of the Scottish Borders (it ignored the border for the early part of the story) and I knew that up on one of the Brotherstone Hills there were two impressive standing stones known, of course, as the Brothers’ Stones. A third had been raised some way down the eastern slope and called the Cow Stone. I wondered if that place of even older, prehistoric sanctity was where Cuthbert had been tending his flocks and where he had seen the angels and Aidan’s soul ascend.
I had never been up to the Brothers’ Stones and so, having fed, watered and walked the dogs that sunny morning in July, I pulled on my boots and drove over to Brotherstone. Or at least I thought I did.
Having crossed the magnificent new bridge over the Tweed and then the much older and narrower bridge over the Leader, I drove east towards Kelso before turning left up a short farm track. There was no sign, but the Ordnance Survey suggested this was Brotherstone and glowering above the steading I could see the south-facing cliff of a steep crag. Having rung the doorbell of the farmhouse and had no reply except the furious barking of a very angry guard-dog, mercifully behind the back door, I walked over to a courtyard of cottages. A lady assured me it was OK to park and she would let the farmer know I was planning to walk up to the stones.
Every fence seemed to be electrified and so I carefully ducked under the wire at all of the gates. It was a thick gauge intended to give straying cattle a real jolt. Below the crag I found what looked like a warren of fox holes, or maybe a badger sett. Whatever creatures had excavated the rich, red earth, they had not troubled to seek the cover of gorse thickets or even long grass, and by the dyke lay the eviscerated carcase of a lamb, recognisable only by the largely untouched head, its clouded eyes bulging. Odd.
I skirted the crag and climbed up to a wide ridge of rough grazing made into large parks by long runs of drystane dyking. In front of each was a low electric wire and when I looked for a gate leading me in the direction I wanted to go, there seemed to be none. Perhaps this was a farm boundary. By this time the sun had strengthened and I was regretting not wearing a hat. When I came upon a tumbled section of dyke, I crawled under one electric wire and scrambled up over the stones to see another on the far side. The ground beyond it was obscured by tall nettles and so I had no means of judging how much of a drop it was. But did I really want to climb back down and carry on looking for a gate? When I jumped down, my right foot glanced off a hidden stone and I was lucky not to twist my ankle or worse. This gentle walk up a low hill was turning into a business.
When I reached what I reckoned to be the summit, there were no standing stones to be seen anywhere, only another slightly higher summit about two hundred yards further east. When I reached it, more disappointment waited, more head-scratching, more bewildered consultation of my map. I tried to locate a strip of sitka spruce below me and relate it to the route I had taken. My map was from the old Pathfinder series, about thirty years old and sitkas grew quickly. Was it too old to show the strip? And then it dawned. The unnamed farm where I parked could not have been Brotherstone. Instead of telling her I was going up to see the stones (she must have thought I was taking the scenic route), I should have checked with the lady at the cottages that I was in the right place.
As I marched back downhill and slid and scrambled under more electric fencing, very warm by now, with flies buzzing around me, trying not to become bad-tempered, I remembered another spectacularly bad piece of map-reading more than fifty years before, one that made me smile.
In the mid-1960s orienteering was a new sport in Scotland, imported from the forests of Scandinavia, and at Kelso High School we had Mr Climie, a real enthusiast. Having taught us the basics of map-reading with a Swedish Silva compass, we were then told to set off in search of a series of controls or check-points hidden in the Bowmont Forest, near Kelso. It seemed like good fun, very different, thinking and running at the same time. For the 1965 Scottish Schools Championships we went up to the vast forests around Aberfoyle in Highland Perthshire. The idea was to run around a course in the correct sequence and have your map time-stamped by the officials at each control. The fastest team would be the winners.
In our team of four I was last to go and almost immediately made a catastrophic error. I read my compass bearing 180 degrees wrong and ran round the course backwards, arriving at the finish, which turned out to be the start. My three team-mates had made good times, but to win we needed all four competitors to complete, even though my time would be terrible. They shouted to me that there was only forty minutes to go before the course and the competition would shut down. I turned round and set off again, knowing exactly where all the controls were, having already visited them – in reverse order. I re-appeared at the gate into the field where the finish was with only a few minutes remaining and, responding to the agitated cries of my teammates, I sprinted home and we won – just.
Having discovered the sign for the real Brotherstone Farm, I finally managed to park in the right place and began once more to walk uphill. A very rough and pitted track ran off to the west, and so I ignored it and climbed a gate to join another that ran to the north-east, the direction I wanted to go. Or so I thought.
Almost immediately I was met by a wall of very dense and prickly gorse bushes. Having turned to the west, I then ran into another insurmountable obstacle: the sheer face of an old sandstone quarry. It seemed that Cuthbert and the Brothers’ Stones were working hard to keep their secrets. In fact all of my journey to Lindisfarne would turn out to involve mistakes and more than a little effort, emphatically not a tour guided by a handbook or a reliable map, either paper or cerebral. I had guessed that ‘pilgrimage’ would probably involve adversity, but not that most of it would be self-inflicted.
When I began to wade through waist-high willowherb and nettles to the side of the quarry, the sun had climbed high in the sky and a cloud of flies was circling around my damp hair and forehead. But then the weeds and the gorse thinned and the walking suddenly improved as I breasted the ridge above the quarry. And there in the distance, on the crown of the easternmost of the Brotherstone Hills, clearly silhouetted against a cobalt-blue sky, was a tall standing stone.
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