Читать книгу To the Island of Tides - Alistair Moffat - Страница 13

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The Hill of Faith

It was a day of high summer. A cloudless July sky, perfectly still, without even a breath of a breeze riffling the topmost leaves of the old sycamores on the ridge above the track. In the Tile Field, about half a mile below our farmhouse, all the sheep and cattle were lying down and the only animals I could see moving were the four horses who graze the field beyond them. They are at a DIY livery at the neighbouring farm and each morning one or two women come with bowls of hard feed and a barrow to pick up their muck. It was so quiet I could hear them talking. It is astonishing how sound carries across our little valley, and this morning I could clearly hear the bleat of sheep in the fields above Brownmoor, as well as the distant purr of a quad bike as the shepherd went up onto the southern ridge to check on the flock about a mile to the south.

As Maidie, my West Highland terrier puppy, and I walked along the track by the old wood, the women must have been three-quarters of a mile away. Not far enough for Maidie. A very territorial terrier, she had stopped when the horsewomen began to speak, pricked her ears and barked loudly at them. How dare they! Who are they? This set off the collies up at Brownmoor, and then moments later, across the stillness of the morning, I heard the big, booming bark of Chiquita at Burn Cottage down at the bottom of the Long Track that leads to our farm. She is a huge Newfoundland. Doggy stereo rang round the hills. But it soon calmed down and we walked on through the waking landscape, stopping and staring at all our familiar glories.

We live on a small farm in the Scottish Borders. At least I think we do. I have never been sure what to call the little bit of the planet we own and look after. At eighty acres, it is bigger than a smallholding or a croft; I would wince if anyone called it an estate, but it seems too small to be a farm. We do not grow any crops except grass, and my wife manages about twenty-five acres of pasture to breed horses. So, I guess ‘small farm’ is the least inaccurate description. Below the house we have gradually built up a stable block that now has ten loose boxes, a hay barn and a tack room, and by the track that leads down to the lane and from there to the main road we have added more outbuildings, an arena and barns. One of these is my office, a large room overflowing with books and runs of periodicals that have helped me write mainly Scottish history over the last twenty-five years.

Perhaps one of my most eccentric possessions is a series of annual volumes published by the Berwickshire Naturalists’ Club. Founded in 1831 by Dr George Johnston of Berwick-upon-Tweed, it is the oldest active natural history field club in Britain and its object (what would now be called a mission statement) is pleasingly limited. Members are interested in ‘investigating the natural history of Berwickshire and its vicinage’, while the club badge carries the figure of a wood sorrel, Johnston’s favourite flower, and the motto is Mare et Tellus et quod Omnia, Coelum – ‘The Sea and the Land and what covers all, the Heavens’. Wonderful. Especially the use of the obscure ‘vicinage’ instead of vicinity.

From the BNC, I discovered that in the summer of 1930 a group of members had visited what they reckoned to be the ancient village of Wrangham between Kelso and St Boswells. Their guide, Rev. W.L. Sime, pointed to a row of ancient ash trees at Brotherstone Farm, saying that it grew where the village once stood. Andrew Armstrong’s map of the Borders made in 1771 also plotted its remains at the farm. This immediately caught my interest because I had been reading the Anonymous Life of St Cuthbert in the excellent translation by Bertram Colgrave, a scholar at the University of Durham. There are three eighth-century versions of lives of Cuthbert, two written by that more venerable and very great scholar Bede of Jarrow, but the earliest is the anonymous text almost certainly written by a monk on Lindisfarne between 699 and 705, only twelve or at most eighteen years after Cuthbert died.

The first Life is also more richly detailed than the others and contains what sounds like testimony from monks who knew Cuthbert. The account of his miracles and deeds feels at once more personal, more authentic, less formulaic, less political. It seems that Cuthbert was of Anglian rather than native Celtic descent (his name itself suggests that); the son of a landed, perhaps noble family, for the young boy was sent to be fostered, a common practice in early medieval Britain and Ireland and a means of extending bonds of loyalty and obligation amongst ruling elites. The prime purpose of both Bede’s and the Anonymous Life was to establish Cuthbert’s cult of sainthood and recount the miracles he wrought with God’s help. Here is a passage from the earlier Life that also imparts a little biographical detail:

At the same time the holy man of God was invited by a certain woman called Kenswith, who is still alive, a nun and a widow who had brought him up from his 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.

A well-used track, rutted by wheeled vehicles, led up to the stone and gradually I saw that it was the same one that had seemed to swing away out to the west. It had turned towards the sitka spruce plantation and then aimed directly at the summit of the hill. The walking was easy and, as I climbed, the vistas on all sides began to reveal themselves. They were panoramic, long views to all points of the compass, some of them more than twenty miles. A breeze began to cool me, the flies fled and I walked the last few hundred yards in a good rhythm.

As I neared the summit of the hill, the second stone revealed itself, having been hidden by a rocky outcrop. Both were very bulky, not like the slender slivers of the Stones of Stenness, or the Ring of Brodgar on Orkney, or Calanais on the Isle of Lewis, and they no doubt weighed many tons. The taller Brother towered over me at well over two and a half metres and the other was shorter, more stumpy. As if ignoring these majestic, dramatic ancient monuments to a forgotten faith, the farm track ran precisely between them before dipping downhill towards the Cow Stone. It too was very bulky, standing about three hundred metres to the north-east, looking as though it had been carefully placed in some sort of alignment with the stones up on the summit. But the tracks of modern traffic could not diminish the magic of this place.

Probably dragging them with ropes over log rollers, the people who erected the stones on Brotherstone Hill expended great labour to set them there. But while the details of their religious rites will almost certainly never be discovered, the reason why they raised the standing stones on the hill could not have been clearer to me. The panorama was so vast, so heart-piercingly beautiful in the midday sun, that to stand by the Brothers’ Stones and simply gaze at it was thrilling.

Below us the valley of the Tweed, the great, life-giving river, widens as the Tweed winds its way east to the sea between the sheltering hills. To the south rise the foothills of the Cheviots, and I could see the rounded shape of Yeavering Bell, a place Cuthbert would come to know. Clouds clustered over the long hump of Cheviot itself and my eye was led to the watershed ridge running west, the line of the English border, where I could pick out the twin peaks of the Maiden Paps. Closer is the conical, volcanic shape of Ruberslaw and beyond it the hills of the Ettrick Forest. Much closer rise the Eildons, Roman Trimontium, the three hills that dominate the upper Tweed Valley: Eildon Hill North, Eildon Mid Hill and Eildon Wester Hill.

To the north-west, also close, is Earlston Black Hill, Dun Airchille, the Meeting Fort – all places where the strangeness and romance of Thomas of Ercildoune, True Thomas, Thomas the Rhymer, still clings. A prophet who foresaw the death of Alexander III in 1286 and whose predictions were widely believed and repeated, Thomas was perhaps the most famous Scotsman of the Middle Ages. The low ridges of the Lammermuirs lie to the north, many studded with groups of elegant white wind turbines, their sails turning lazily in the breeze. And standing up proud above the horizon in the north-east, I could easily make out the summits of Great Dirrington Law and Little Dirrington Law.

Forming a vast natural amphitheatre, the hills surround the courses of the great river and its tributaries on three sides. On the fourth, to the east, the horizon dips low as the patchwork of ripening fields edge down towards the seashore. With a hand on the cool mass of the taller of the two Brothers, its surface smoothed by the winds, rain and snows of 5,000 winters, I looked and looked out over a landscape I know intimately but one I had never gazed upon from this place. And somewhere in my memory, deep inside my sense of myself, the warmth of an old love began to glow once more.

I was born and raised in the valley of the great river and I know that my ancestors have been on the banks of the Tweed for many, many centuries, ploughing the fields, coaxing food from the soil, perhaps seventy generations living and dying within sight of the sheltering hills. The rich red and black earth is grained in my hands. But as I grew older, sat and passed (mostly) exams, heeded the advice of my parents ‘to get on’ and ‘stick in at the school’ and ‘make something of yourself’, I knew I would have to leave, have to tear up deep roots and go and live somewhere else. And so I did. After university at St Andrews, Edinburgh and London, I was, to my amazement, appointed to run the Edinburgh Festival Fringe in 1975 and despite my youth (I was twenty-five) and inexperience, I made a success of it. My big break; it led to everything else and a twenty-year career in television that brought rewards and occasional satisfaction. But I always nursed a need to come home, to return to the Tweed Valley, and having bought our little farmhouse, I decided to resign my well-paid job and begin the precarious life of a freelance writer. At forty-nine, I still had energy and ambition. And so for almost twenty years I have lived and worked in the Scottish Borders – and gradually taken all of its beauties and glories for granted.

When I climbed the hill to look at the stones, I had given little thought to the hill itself, the place the old peoples had chosen, but when I looked out from it, the elemental power of its beauty flooded back, an uncomplicated, unconditional love for the fields, forests, hills and intimate valleys of my native land, my home-place. That reminder was to be the first of Cuthbert’s gifts.

And up on the hill, history was whispering. The Eildon Hills to the south-west rose abruptly from the floodplain of the Tweed, their flanks steep, their three-summit outline dramatic and distinctive. The name ‘Eildon’ derives from Old Welsh, the language spoken by native communities before Cuthbert and my Anglian ancestors brought early versions of English, and it means ‘the old fortress’. It was attached to one summit, to Eildon Hill North, and it is closest to Brotherstone Hill. The name described a long perimeter of double ditching dug some time at the outset of the first millennium BC. But it cannot have been defensive. Probably topped by a palisade of wooden posts, the ditching runs for a mile around the crown of the hill, and instead of one or two gateways it has five. A huge force of defenders would have been needed to man these ramparts, especially the weak points at the gates, and if they had, they would soon have been thirsty. There is no spring or source of water other than what fell from the sky.

Eildon Hill North was not a fort but a temple, and a place of spiritual and temporal power. Inside the long perimeter, more than three hundred hut platforms have been found, enough to house a population of about three thousand. Lack of water and the need for all provisions to be lugged up the steep slopes probably meant a temporary occupation of these huts, almost certainly for significant points in the year; times of celebration, worship, perhaps sacrifice and perhaps propitiation of whatever gods were believed to govern the lives of mortals 3,000 years ago.

The oldest calendar in Britain revolves around the half-forgotten turning points in the farming year of the native Celtic peoples. It begins at the end of October with Samhuinn – in Gaelic: ‘the end of summer’. It is now Christianised as Hallowe’en and seen as the beginning of winter and the moment when the clocks change. But the remnants of ancient, pagan practices still survive and versions of these would likely have been enacted by those who climbed Eildon Hill North on Samhuinn Eve.

Originally, guising at Hallowe’en did not involve outlandish dressing-up but a simple daubing of ash from the great bonfires that blazed in the darkness to effect a symbolic disguise, the cue for all sorts of licence between men and women. It persisted for millennia and in the 1796 Statistical Account for Scotland, kirk ministers in several parishes were complaining about ‘A sort of secret society of Guisers made itself notorious in several of the neighbouring villages, men dressed as women, women dressed as men, dancing in a very unseemly way.’

There is persuasive evidence that belief in late prehistoric society attached great significance to the human head, perhaps as the repository of essence, of what might have been seen as the soul. Roman historians reported that European Celts were fond of collecting the heads of their enemies as grisly trophies, sometimes attaching them by the hair to their saddles, even preserving them in cedar oil. In Scotland, skulls have been found at several sites and their arrangement suggests that they were displayed in some way. As late as AD 70, the priests of Venutius, the native king of the Brigantes, a federation of Celtic kindreds on either side of the Pennines, set up a row of skulls to defend a rampart against the assault of Roman legions. This has been described as a ghost fence.

These ancient beliefs still sound a distant echo at Hallowe’en. When hollowed-out turnip or pumpkin lanterns have a candle placed inside and are set on a windowsill, it looks very much like a relic of paganism; a ghost fence still flickering in the early dark of winter.

At Imbolc in February, fires blazed once more inside the precinct on Eildon Hill North. The festival has been Christianised as St Bridget’s Day and it was the moment of first fruits, when ewes began to lactate in anticipation of lambing. In early May, Beltane signalled the beginning of the time-worn journey of transhumance, when flocks and herds were moved up the hill trails to summer grazing. This was celebrated in Scotland as late as the early nineteenth century with ritual meals washed down with a liberal amount of alcohol. Not surprisingly, the kirk wagged its finger at what ministers knew to be a relict of paganism. The final nodal point came around in August. Lughnasa is now pronounced as ‘Lammas’ and a famous fair is held in St Andrews. This was the time grass-fattened beasts were bartered for slaughter or breeding, and the clustering of agricultural shows at that time in the calendar remembers the pivotal importance of the old Celtic feast.

All of these turning points revolved around the behaviour and needs of domesticated flocks and herds and the rhythms of a stock-rearing society. Weather mattered to our ancestors even more than it does for modern farmers. Three thousand years ago there were no large byres to overwinter cattle, there was little or no shelter from the winter’s blast other than the folds of the land or the leafless trees of the wildwood. Severe snow, ice and cold, wind-driven rain saw many animals die and a parched summer could mean that they did not put on condition. To judge their prospects, farmers looked to the sky, and it seems that by the first millennium BC it was also where they looked for the gods that would help them rear their beasts and bring home their harvests safely.

Priest-kings climbed Eildon Hill North on the Celtic feast days to be nearer to their pantheon and to be seen by the divine beings who in some way controlled what happened on the Earth, who sent good and bad fortune, who sent snow, wind, rain or sun. They were sky gods, and the great enclosure on Eildon Hill North was not a fortress but a sky temple.

The Brothers’ Stones do not stand on the highest part of their hill. To the west, there is a rocky outcrop, which hid the second stone as I approached up the farm track, and I sat down there to look at and think about the relationship of the great temple and the stones, if there was one. And how all of this might have been understood by Cuthbert.

The stones were probably dragged up Brotherstone Hill a long time before the ditches were dug on Eildon Hill North, perhaps a thousand or even two thousand years before. But I cannot think that this concentration of monuments was an accident. Perhaps the link was simple – the sky. Thunder, lightning and the drama of the weather have long been associated with the gods and their moods, and on Brotherstone Hill there is no better place to watch it change or settle, not even from the sky temple. Eildon Hill North does not have all-round panoramic views. Instead its longest vistas stretch to the east, to the twin stones and the Cow Stone at the foot of the slope. They felt and looked to me like a gateway, the doors of some sort of lost perception. I am very sceptical about all of the musings of those who follow ley-lines and other invisible trigonometry in the landscape, and I know I am straying perilous close, but there did seem to be some sort of alignment between the summit of Eildon Hill North, the Brothers’ Stones and the Cow Stone.

Cuthbert cannot have been insensitive to the ghosts of the pagan past that swirled around the hill where he tended sheep. Both the Anonymous Life and Bede’s speak of his missions of conversion, his attempts to defeat pagan belief in the Borders, in the hills around Melrose, persuading country people to turn away from amulets and incantations and back to the love of Christ. And yet the stones may still have been venerated in some way. Perhaps the young shepherd saw Brotherstone Hill as a Christian sky temple, a spiritual vantage point over the valley of the great river, the place where he could clearly see angels descend and ascend with the glowing orb of fire that was Aidan’s soul. What modern eyes might have seen as an eclipse, a rare Blood Moon, where the sun turns its milky white surface to red, might have seemed like a vision to Cuthbert, metaphor rather than reality, the Earth and the celestial phenomena around it as themselves divine.

Turning over these half-formed notions about the sacred earth, the hallowed ground, a place where saints had walked, I sat for a long time by the old stones, watching cloud shadows chase across the sunlit fields before disappearing into the folds of the hills. Even though the account of Cuthbert’s vision is infused with biblical tropes, from Jacob’s dream of the stairway to heaven at Bethel in the Old Testament to the shepherds tending their flocks at night on the eve of the Nativity in the New, I was thinking about something beyond the scriptural. Below me, on the lower slopes of the hill, a flock of newly shorn ewes were bent over the sweet grass of fresh pasture, the lambs almost as big as their mothers. Thirteen centuries since the boy woke his fellow shepherds to tell them what he had seen in the sky, sheep were still grazing on Brotherstone Hill. And the skies above were still immense and dramatic.

When I ask myself a pressing question, more and more pressing on the threshold of my eighth decade, about what I believe, the provisional answer has nothing to do with the divine, a Christian god or any other, or indeed any conventional hope of an afterlife. I believe in an immortality of a different sort: the immortality of continuity, especially continuity in the same place. I will live on through the lives and memories of my children and their children. Even though that will fade in time, perhaps in only three generations, there will be a pile of dusty books somewhere with their forewards, dedications, blurbs and contents where some sense of my life and what I thought can be assembled. If anyone is interested.

With Cuthbert, even though there is no certain way to know his ancestral DNA, I feel that because mine is also Anglian, we have a direct connection. And on that warm and sunny day on the hill, I felt I could hear him on the edge of the wind, murmuring his prayers, looking up at what I was looking at, searching the sky for angels. But he could not have known that he was gazing upon a large part of what would become known as St Cuthbert’s Land, a place where dozens of churches would be dedicated to him and where, for 1,000 years, documents would carry the phrase ‘for St Cuthbert and for God’. And I did not know until that moment my journey had actually begun. I hoped the shepherd boy would lead me down the hill and that I could walk with his shadow to the monastery at Old Melrose.