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In the Sacred Land

It had been a parched summer, the hottest and longest for more than forty years, with the sun beating down almost every day since the beginning of May. After a six-month winter, with the last snowfall in early April, the landscape was flooded with welcome light and warmth.

Temperatures climbed steadily and reached ninety degrees Fahrenheit in the last week of July. For weeks on end we sweltered in the high seventies and eighties, and virtually no rain fell. But then one evening the heat suddenly became very oppressive, and over the dark heads of the southern hills gunmetal-grey clouds quickly gathered. Far in the distance, thunder rumbled. By 9 p.m. it had grown very dark, and after a few spots it began to rain torrentially. While we ran around the farmhouse closing windows, there was a tremendous crack of thunder directly overhead that made us all flinch instinctively and sheet lightning lit the black sky.

An overnight downpour began, the raindrops huge, and it had a dramatic effect around the farmhouse, especially on the track. In towns and cities, heavy rain falls on hard surfaces – roofs, tarmac and pavements – and is usually taken away by efficient drainage. When it stops, and especially if the sun shines afterwards, it is as though it has never fallen. Here, heavy rain leaves its mark for many days. Much of the rammed earth and pebbles, compacted by vehicle wheels, hooves and feet, was washed away, exposing the stones of the old track, like Roman cobbles. It was worst down at the house, where the velocity of the flow was strongest. I could see that the downpour of the previous night had created a miniature water world, a network of tiny river channels, oxbows, deltas, lakes and dams, something that would delight a child. The bottom track is about a 15% gradient and 120 yards long, and so when the little rivers of rain reached the bend around the gable end of the old house, they had considerable force and carried a lot of pebbles and silt with them. As the camber forced the rainwater to turn, it cut out little river cliffs two or three inches high, as the fine silt piled up. It was like speeded-up land formation, millions of years of geology recreated by one night of torrential rain.

By the time I took the dogs out at 6.30 a.m., the sky had cleared and a watery sun blinked above the woods out to the east. As often 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 of Bemersyde. To the southeast, in a dip between two ridges, lies Bemersyde Moss, a small loch surrounded by tussocky wetland, the perfect habitat for these fishermen, relatives of the heron. The place-name is an example of transference. In Old English, the language of Cuthbert, ‘bemere’ means ‘to trumpet’; its call, instead of the bird itself, found its way onto the map. It is likely that the hamlet existed in the seventh century during the Anglian takeover of the Tweed Valley, and after I had walked out of the tree-shaded lane, the C road I had been following joined a B road bathed in bright sunshine, where its houses clustered.

Most of these are modern, strung out on either side of the road that runs east to west, and their views must be sweeping. Around each are arranged neat and colourful gardens, the deposit of much care and effort. As I passed, a dog leaped up and barked suddenly at a gate and the owner came to calm the old collie and apologise. There was no need, but what struck me was the sense of contentment the lady seemed to have as she talked about the remarkable summer and I praised her beautiful garden of roses, geraniums and hydrangeas and the pots, baskets and borders of rich colour. As I walked off down the road, I wondered about my own choices in life. A comfortable modern house with long views, a decent pension, plenty of time to indulge interests and no need to keep striving, pushing and hoping – all of that suddenly seemed very attractive, something my wife Lindsay and I could easily have opted for.

Instead, of course, we took the harder and, more than occasionally, I think, the dafter path. The joys have mostly outweighed the difficulties, but the life of a freelance and its income is precarious and has significantly diminished over time. More than once, we have had to scrape through a tough year. And at sixty-eight, I worry that my earning capacity is beginning to slacken. More and more often, I look at bungalows like those at Bemersyde and wonder about comfortable sofas, lie-ins on a weekday, playing at writing something I don’t need to finish because I don’t need the money, and joining a book group. But so far these thoughts are fleeting, driven out by the likelihood that I would soon become bored, vastly overweight and possibly over-fond of New Zealand sauvignon blanc, if I am not already. For me at least, for the moment, hard work, no holidays, only the occasional day off and bouts of intermittent anxiety are probably healthy.

And probably inevitable. Just as Cuthbert may have been surrendering to his essential nature, recognising that his piety, his wish to leave the world and strive to know the mind of God, would always prevail over his inherited status as an aristocrat of some sort, so I have begun to realise that I could have lived no other sort of life. I am a risk-taker, someone who sees how well things can turn out and never seriously considers how badly wrong they can go, or if that sounds a little melodramatic, someone who could not bear to be too safe and take refuge in the false securities and certainties of routine. I could not have stayed in a salaried job, served my time until my pension had fattened up, for I would have lost my life if I had wasted all those years just turning up every Monday morning, ticking off the months and years until retirement, wishing my life away.

Instead, I took the risk of depending on myself, not leaning on the support of an institution, and trying to make a living from what was in my head. I don’t much care if that sounds self-aggrandising or even puffed-up; it is nothing less than the truth. I had to be true to my nature – although that sounds a little pat and premeditated. At the time it didn’t feel like that, it was just something I had to do. Even though I had not properly thought out the consequences of diving into the depths of uncertainty twenty years ago, I knew I had to get out of corporate life and accept all the insecurities that came with that decision. And even though the life of a freelance is very dependent on the wishes, whims and appetites of others, those who commission our work or grant money to support it, I suppose I am content with the conditional truth that I have at least been my own man.

But alternative choices can sometimes be surprising and illuminating. At the end of 2017 I met a man I had not seen for fifty years. We played representative schoolboy rugby together in the Borders before he went off to Edinburgh University to take a degree in geology and then a job with De Beer in South Africa. Very dashing, but certainly uncomfortable and almost certainly risky, as well as a radically different choice from mine to stay and make a life in Scotland. When we met for supper in Melrose, I worried that we would have little or nothing to say to each other. In fact, it turned out to be fascinating.

Alone for weeks on end in the African bush, taking sample cores, looking for likely places where diamonds might be mined, my old rugby-playing friend often found that he had spoken to no one for long periods. Instead, he began to read the novels of Walter Scott in publication sequence, and not only worthwhile in itself, it was a habit that reconnected my friend with the Borders. The famous Scott quote, ‘Breathes there the man, with soul so dead, Who never to himself hath said, This is my own, my native land!’ was precisely apposite. My friend’s mother is still alive and he flies north from his home on the coast near Cape Town to the Scottish Borders at least two or three times a year. His connection to our home-place is powerful. As is mine. When I resigned my job, there was no other choice I could consider except to come home, to return to the sacred land.

Continuity and attachment to place are rarely more evident than in the story of Bemersyde House. Turning downhill from the hamlet, I passed its gates and saw the sixteenth-century tower house in the distance. The same family has lived there for eight centuries since it came into the possession of a Norman warrior called Petrus de Haga. By the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries, the name had changed slightly but become so established that Thomas the Rhymer could recite:

Tyde what may,

Whate’er betyde

Haig shall be Haig of Bemersyde.

And so it has come to pass. Alexander, the grandson of Field Marshal Earl Haig, the commander of the British army on the Western Front during the First World War, now lives in the old house.

Below the gates, the road begins to run down gently off the ridge and becomes deep and heavily shaded, a sign of real antiquity, since it has sunk far below the level of the fields beside it simply because of the centuries of feet, hooves and wheels, the tread of people, horses and the ruts made by carts. Powerful knots of tree roots cling like octopuses to the high banks and their thick foliage shades the road for a few hundred yards. It eventually leads to an oddity, a dissonance.

When the sixteenth century and the Reformation signalled the end for Scotland’s monastic communities, abbeys often fell under the control of commendators, usually aristocrats who eventually appropriated their lands. The holdings and power of many aristocratic families are built on the patrimony of the church. The Erskine family, earls of Buchan, were given Dryburgh Abbey and much of the nearby property that had been gifted to the monks over many years. By the early nineteenth century, David Stuart Erskine, the 11th earl, had become fascinated, even obsessed by Scotland’s history and heroes. He founded the Society of Antiquaries, whose collections formed the basis of those of the national museums of Scotland. Walter Scott knew Erskine well and was uncharacteristically ungenerous, saying that he was a man whose ‘immense vanity obscured, or rather eclipsed, very considerable talents’. On that sunny day below Bemersyde, it seemed to me that an understanding of what made good art was not amongst them.

The deepened lane leads downhill to a brown sign on the left that points to ‘Wallace Statue’. At the end of a winding wooded track, perched on a high, precipitous bank, is a monstrous red sandstone sculpture of one of Scotland’s great heroes. William Wallace, the victor of Stirling Bridge in 1298, stands twenty-one feet high on a ten-foot plinth, staring sightlessly westwards over the Tweed Valley. Made by a local sculptor, John Smith of Darnick, no doubt to a precise prescription from the Earl of Buchan, it could never be mistaken for the work of Michelangelo. In fact it is profoundly ugly. Holding a broadsword almost as tall as himself in one hand and a shield bearing the device of the Saltire in the other, the hero looks more than a little gormless, a slightly puzzled expression above his bushy beard, as though he were lost. On his head, and therefore difficult to make out from thirty-one feet below, a version of an iron helmet that owes more to the Wehrmacht than anything medieval has some sort of winged creature attached. Perhaps a pigeon. Mercifully, the hardwood trees around this thoroughly duff object have begun to hide it. From a distance, to the west, all that can be made out is the head – until autumn sheds the friendly leaves.

Further down the road to Dryburgh Abbey I came across something much more eloquent, a fragment of cut stone that was definitely more pleasing, clear confirmation that people had walked and ridden this way for very many centuries. Easy to miss in the left-hand verge, hard against the edge of the tarmac, sits a cross socket. Now filled with rainwater, it once held a tall and impressive cross that offered a place to pray and that marked a boundary. Abbeys, priories, convents, churches and other places of pilgrimage often lay inside a wide precinct whose outer limits were fringed by crosses set up by the sides of the roads that led to the sacred sites. Around Coldingham Priory on the Berwickshire coast, founded in the mid-seventh century and a place Cuthbert visited, there were at least three crosses at three approaches: Applincross, Whitecross and Cairncross. No more than this unconsidered little stump survives from Dryburgh, but there must have been others. When Cuthbert rode past it, he left the temporal world and entered holy ground.

Before a long avenue of trees wrapped the road in shadow, wide vistas to the south and west opened over the rich, pale yellow of ripening barley. Rain was gathering in the west, a grey veiling drifting across the hills of the Ettrick Forest and the shelter of the deep lane made it difficult to judge where the wind blew. I quickened my pace downhill to Dryburgh, noticing that gaps in the trees to my right showed what an ever-present landmark Eildon Hill North was. It seemed to be following me around the landscape.

Dryburgh is the only one of the four Border abbeys not found in a town and consequently its fabric is more complete, having suffered much less at the hands of stone robbers. After the Reformation, the masonry of the great churches at Kelso, Melrose and Jedburgh could be seen in the walls, and no doubt the foundations, of nearby houses. Sheltered by stands of ancient trees – one yew is said to have been planted by the monks in the early twelfth century – and surrounded by a vallum, a ditch deepened in modern times to keep out grazing and browsing animals, Dryburgh Abbey is a very romantic ruin, and also strange, other-worldly.

Many years ago I made a television series called The Sea Kingdoms, the story of Celtic Britain and Ireland. We filmed in Cornwall, Ireland, the Western Isles and in Wales. On our way out to St David’s in Pembrokeshire, surely the only cathedral village in Europe, we took a detour to a place associated with another early holy man, St Justinian. According to the map, near the coastal hamlet was an interesting series of prehistoric remains, a small stone circle and a dolmen, a megalithic tomb of two upright stones that supported a horizontal capstone. I thought some shots of these against the sea might be useful in opening credits.

The landscape was patterned by a warren of narrow paths threaded between rocky outcrops and tall clumps of impenetrable gorse. It was easy to become disoriented. Near the dolmen, we came across an unexpected small cottage with a fenced front garden full of colourful wooden objects: stripy posts, a large doll and a cart. Bunting fluttered on some of them. As our camera and sound men gratefully put down their kit, my director and I knocked on the door. Perhaps we were trespassing and needed permission to film. There was no answer at first, and then I began to make out a low drone, almost like a growl but not something that sounded like a guard dog. When there was no answer and we retreated, it was replaced by a high-pitched whine, a keening that slowly built up but did not seem to come from the cottage.

After exchanging glances, we walked back to the dolmen, wondering what we might meet around each corner of the path, shot some general views, packed up our kit and walked, quite quickly, back to the cars. More than strangeness, this little enclave in the landscape had a powerful atmosphere, something malign, and even though it was a bright day, good for filming, we all felt uncomfortable and were relieved to park at St David’s and set up our next sequence of shots amongst the crowds.

Dryburgh’s strangeness is not malign, it seems to me, but it is not a place of settled peace either. For some who visit, God may be close, but I had a powerful sense of other presences, perhaps the spirits of the pagan past were flitting in the shadows of the old trees. The early history of the abbey and its site is scant but it might cast a dim light on these competing impressions.

All of the original locations of the great twelfth-century monastic foundations in the Borders are to be found in the loops of rivers. Jedburgh Abbey rises above a sinuous bend in the Jed Water while Dryburgh, Kelso and Old Melrose are all bounded in part by loops in the course of the Tweed. Such a wide and deep river was a real barrier for millennia, until the bridge-building of the modern age, and it offered a degree of seclusion, a clear division between the temporal and the sacred worlds.

Early Christians were attracted to sites like these because they were impressed and inspired by a group of ascetics known as the Desert Fathers. Perhaps the best known in sixth- and seventh-century Western Europe was St Anthony of Egypt. Copies of his Life, written by St Athanasius of Alexandria, found their way to Britain and Ireland, and scholars believe that both Bede and the anonymous biographer of Cuthbert were able to consult this short but remarkable text. It relates how in the late third century Anthony was raised in a Christian household of some considerable means. When both his parents died, he seems to have had an epiphany. Giving away all of his inherited wealth, a farm of 300 acres and much else of value, he put his younger sister into a convent and embarked on a life of piety and asceticism. After many battles with the Devil and his legions of demons, he sought a solitary life, shutting himself up in a tomb at one point, starving himself and forcing himself into cycles of prayer and vigil. Although Athanasius nowhere states this explicitly, there is a sense threading through the narrative (and others) of the hermit using mortification of the flesh to induce a trance-like state so that he might have out-of-body experiences, something that may have seemed to detach his immortal soul from his worldly flesh. This appears to have been a continuing practice amongst these early saints.

Eventually, Anthony fled to the deserts beyond the fertile valley of the Nile to pursue a life of solitude that might draw him nearer to God. But his fame had spread and, according to Athanasius, ‘cells arose in the mountains, and the desert was colonised by monks who came forth from their own people . . . and he directed them like a father’. And then Anthony retreated even further, to a holy mountain, his ‘inner mountain’, where he lived out the rest of his harsh life. Surviving the persecutions of the Emperor Maximinus II in 311, he died some time later after giving instructions that his body was to be buried in secret so that it could not become a focus for reverence or pilgrimage, something else that would be clearly echoed at the end of Cuthbert’s own life.

The teachings and habits of the Desert Fathers inspired early Irish monks to seek places apart from the world, places of solitude with no worldly distractions. In a Gaelic rendering of deserta, they called their hermitages and communities dìseartan and it is a description that survives in the Scottish place-name of Dysart on the Fife coast, Dyzard in Cornwall, several Dyserths in Wales, and many Diserts in Ireland. Celtic monks let water, both salt and fresh, take the place of the sands of the Egyptian and Judaean deserts, and in the loops of the River Tweed at least two and perhaps four disearts were established in the sixth century as the spirit of Anthony reached across a continent.

Some time around 522, before Columba sailed to Iona in 563, an Irish monk called Modan came to Dryburgh, where he appears to have settled for a time. The son of an Irish sub-king, he has left shadowy traces of his journeys around Scotland. Ardchattan near Loch Etive was once Balmodhan, the settlement of Modan, Kilmodan on the Isle of Bute was his church, St Modan’s High School in Stirling remembers his presence in the Forth Valley, and his relics are said to have been enshrined at St Modan’s Church at Rosneath, across the Gare Loch from Helensburgh. In September 2015, local archaeologists rediscovered St Modan’s Well in the woods above Glendaruel in Argyll and found pebbles of bright quartz around it that had been left by pilgrims who had come to pray there and seek his blessing over many centuries before the Reformation.

At Dryburgh nothing remains of Modan’s presence except for the faint echo of a story. Having reluctantly taken up the office of abbot, he resigned and left the monastery so that he could be free to follow the life of a hermit over in the west of Scotland, near Dumbarton. Given that his relics found their way to Rosneath, it is reasonable to suppose that the Irishman died there. All of these references and locations suggest that the widely travelled monk was a real pre-Columban presence in the Borders, even though no material or documentary record of him can be found.

When Cuthbert rode past the cross by the road and made his way with his servant downhill to Dryburgh, he may have known the story of Modan, but the fact that he moved on to Old Melrose probably means that the early foundation had not survived the saint’s departure.

But I think that Modan’s spirit still flits around the ruined transept, the presbytery beyond it, the cloister and the tumbled walls of the twelfth-century abbey. It was probably built on that site because he had chosen it, dedicated it to God, made it sacred with prayer, and the stories lingered as the centuries passed. And more than that, I believe that like many Irish monks Modan made a link with the pagan past. He will certainly have worn the Druidic tonsure. Monks influenced by the doctrines of the Church of Rome had their hair cut from the crowns of their heads, leaving a fringe around the temples and at the back. This was done in imitation of Christ’s crown of thorns. By contrast, Irish monks and many in Scotland were tonsured across the crowns of their heads, from ear to ear, giving them very high foreheads. Scholars believe that the pagan priests of the first millennium BC, the Druids encountered by the Roman invaders, wore their hair in the same way, their foreheads probably marked by tattoos.

On their missions of conversion of the sixth and seventh centuries, Christian priests and monks were mindful of the advice of Pope Gregory the Great. In the 590s, he ordained that instead of destroying pagan sites and temples ‘they should be sprinkled with holy water’ and used as places of Christian worship. The pagan festivals of Imbolc, Beltane, Lughnasa and Samhuinn should be celebrated not in veneration of idols but for the sake of ‘good fellowship’. This pragmatic approach recognised that for many conversion was not a blinding light, an epiphany or a moment when the whole world changed, but a process whereby beliefs held over millennia gradually shifted. And it was sensible to worship a Christian god at places that were already sacred. They retained their sense of spirituality and also people knew where they were.

For these reasons, I believe that many sites whose history appears to have started only with the coming of missionaries were in fact sacred long before they arrived and that their original sanctity only withered slowly. Like St Anthony, Modan will have been an ascetic, practising mortification of the flesh in many ways. And in itself, I think that this too was a vital link with the beliefs of those who climbed Eildon Hill North four times a year to light fires and celebrate the turning points of the farming year. Unlike the modern Christian God of love and forgiveness, the pantheon of deities who governed the lives and fates of the peoples of Celtic Britain and Ireland, and also those Angles, Saxons and others who sailed the North Sea in search of land, needed to be propitiated. That is, the malignant, aggressive nature of some of these pagan gods had to be neutralised by acts of sacrifice, and often blood needed to be shed. The discovery of what are known as the bog bodies, prehistoric corpses sufficiently well preserved to show the marks of ritual killing, shows that human sacrifices were sometimes required if the pagan gods were to be persuaded not to send thunder, wind and rain to wreck the harvest, or a pestilence to visit the land. Fear was as powerful as faith.

The notion of human sacrifice was not confined to pagan cultures. The early Christian God of the Old Testament asked Abraham to sacrifice Isaac before relenting, but he could also be vengeful, and for many centuries the awful prospect of the fires and pits of Hell, or eternal torment, was very real indeed for most believers. It seems to me that the ascetic monks and hermits were also practising a version of propitiation, a way of pleasing and appeasing God, committing painful acts not only in pursuit of personal purity, piety and the transcendence of the flesh but also undertaken on behalf of communities. For that latter reason, saints were readily venerated, thanked and seen as figures who floated in a sphere between the mortal and the divine and who could intercede with God on behalf of many people. It is thought that the wide proliferation of early saints (each village in Cornwall seems to have its own) was a gradual substitution for local gods.

Like many of his contemporaries, Modan will have embodied much of this continuity and I think he was drawn to Dryburgh because it was already a holy place for the pre-Christian communities who lived along the banks of the Tweed. And that history has not entirely fled. It can be sensed, buried deep on the site of the twelfth-century abbey, where enough of the fabric survives to allow a good reconstruction of monastic life: the bells ringing the canonical hours at dead of night, the chant of the psalms, readings in the chapter house, the whispering as monks gossiped behind their hands, and all the bustle of a busy community going about the business of worship, management and food production. But under the daily din, the silences as the monks shuffled down the night stair to the church for lauds and other intervals of peace, another river runs, one whose course can only be intuited.

I am certain that Walter Scott knew and felt that Dryburgh was different. Of course with his love of romance, he will have felt at home in the old medieval abbey, its scheming abbots, priors, cellarers and novices gossiping, taking part in medieval politics, celebrating the drama of the Latin mass in the presbytery. But in his life Scott was aware, I think, of a strangeness in his own nature, a sensitivity to another world beyond history. In Ivanhoe and others in his vast canon of historical novels, Scott showed a powerful longing for the past that sometimes glows with roseate nostalgia but also connects with the ethereal, the uncatchable, something fluttering on the edge of his imagination. And few novelists have ever captured a pungent sense of place in the long past so well – but sometimes not completely. There is often something of the unexplained in Scott’s stories. Perhaps that was the deeper reason why he chose to be buried at Dryburgh, not just because it is beautiful but because its roots in the long past reached far down into the earth of the river peninsula and were unknowable. Scott knew that ghosts flitted amongst the ruins.

Next to Scott’s solid granite sarcophagus stands the small, simple headstone of a soldier: Douglas Haig, Field Marshal Earl Haig. He wanted the same memorial that was set up to those hundreds of thousands of soldiers who died under his command in Flanders and he is buried at Dryburgh simply because it is close to Bemersyde. As I stood by these two graves in the north transept, it struck me that there was not an obvious and extreme contrast but a clear connection between the unwilling architect of great slaughter on the Western Front and the man whose stories went a long way to inventing the Scotland that many regiments believed they were fighting to protect.

I spent less time at Dryburgh than I expected, perhaps because I was anxious to catch up with Cuthbert and be on my way. In the wooden hut that serves as a ticket office and small shop, I bought a packet of fudge to keep me going on my journey to Old Melrose. I would need it.

* * *

The road from Dryburgh turns sharply downhill to the flood plain of the Tweed and past some trim new houses built not from bricks or breezeblock but a good deal of cut stone. I passed some beautifully squared blocks of red and yellow sandstone sitting on pallets by the roadside. The starkness of these new builds will weather down well as the sandstone mellows with the years and their gardens grow up. I noted high walls and an electric gate around one house and supposed that rural crime penetrates everywhere, even down this half-hidden old road. I passed a footbridge over the Tweed but ignored it. A mile further north was Monksford and I planned a baptism of sorts, to wade across just as Cuthbert and his servant would have done, leading his horse behind them. After the driest summer for forty years, the river should be low.

At the foot of the road, on a small mound that looked artificial to me, stood another imposition from the eccentric Earl of Buchan. His fascination with Greek mythology drew David Erskine into episodes of laughable daftness. Apparently he once held a soiree where he dressed up as Apollo on Mount Parnassus with nine young ladies dancing around him as his muses. Goodness knows what they made of it. On this mound in front of me, at the beginning of a long, straight stretch known as the Monks’ Road, he had masons build a small, circular, pillared structure he called the Temple of the Muses, and in the centre a statue of Apollo was installed. It has mercifully gone now and been replaced by a modern bronze by Siobhan O’Hehir of four naked women facing in four compass directions to represent the seasons. They look well, their poses not frozen but somehow sinuous and liquid. By contrast, I am certain that the original statue of Apollo would have borne a distinct resemblance to the cavorting earl. Littering the landscape in this way, plonking inappropriate objects in it for his own aggrandisement and amusement, is more than irritating. Just because they are relatively old, it should not automatically mean that this ridiculous temple and the monstrous statue of William Wallace should not be demolished. Far better to remember the monks who walked the old road beside these oddities: Modan, Boisil, Cuthbert and other later figures whose stories were of this place, men who searched the big skies above the river for signs of God’s presence and who helped make the land look as it does now.

Beyond the mound, the long straight track of the Monks’ Road headed north. The Pathfinder map showed that it led to Monksford, and my determination to splash across the Tweed in Cuthbert’s wake. Supplying access to a smart wooden hut on the banks of the river, one used by those paying handsomely to fish the pools of the Dryburgh Upper beat, the road was in good repair and I made good time. At the end I could see a much more overgrown track beyond a metal gate. Tree-lined and curving down to the riverbank, it seemed not to be much used.

In my rucksack, I had packed spare socks, pants and a towel. My plan was to stuff my boots, trousers and socks in the pack and towel myself dry after I had crossed the monks’ ford and gained the farther bank. About halfway down the track, I spotted a likely, leggy rowan and, with my penknife, cut a staff from it. As I waded the river and its uneven bed of smoothed stones, I wanted something to steady me and test the depth in front. Shaded and quiet, I noticed that the track had been used recently when I saw the marks of horseshoes in damp places, and as I finished the last of my fudge I wondered how recently someone had ridden here. I was certain I was following Cuthbert on his horse, for the track was old and there appeared to be no other way down to the ford he must have used to reach Old Melrose.

However, puzzlement and disappointment waited once more. Instead of leading to the riverbank, the track simply petered out amongst some broadleaf woodland. Beyond it the banks of the Tweed were overgrown with bushes, nettles and the wide, rhubarb-like leaves of hogweed. I thought I could make out the shallows of the beginning of the ford but no path led to it. And off to my left I could see where the rider had gone. There was another track leading along the river, but it went back the way I had come. It was probably used by fishermen.

Only a little daunted, and of course rationalising that the path must have disappeared long ago since no one had been daft enough to use the ford for at least a couple of centuries, I used my rowan pole to thrash aside the hogweed and also warn me of sudden, unseen, ankle-twisting ditches in the overgrown bank. Of which there were several.

On what seemed like an area of level ground (but not free of nettles), I checked to see that no one was around to watch the crazy person strip to his pants and shirt, then stuffed everything into my pack. When I splashed at last into the river, a family of ducks erupted a little way upstream and the sun came out to glint brilliantly off the water. It was cold but not icy, and I could see where large flat stones had been laid near the bank, clear remains of the old ford. Some were the same colour of red sandstone that had built the Temple of the Muses.

I had reckoned the Tweed was about sixty or more yards wide at Monksford, but after I had carefully gone about twenty-five yards and the water was up to my knees, I found it difficult to see the bottom and judge what was in front of me. The channel by the far bank was in shadow and I had no idea how deep it might be. The surface was flowing smoothly, like a large volume of water, no stone or shallows broke it and the river seemed to be moving much more slowly. The small, wing-like shapes of sycamore seeds were eddying, not flowing directly downstream. Prodding with the rowan pole, I suddenly felt it go down much further and nearly lost my balance. My heavier pack didn’t help and I rocked a little. I reckoned the pole touched bottom at about three feet, waist height. So, no. There seemed to be an invisible shelf rather than a gradual incline. So, not that way.

I turned upstream, thinking I might have lost the direction of the ford. Even though the maps all showed it running the shortest distance, directly from bank to opposite bank, perhaps it crossed on the diagonal? No. Not that way either. The far channel seemed deep there too. My baptism into the world of Cuthbert was baulked by a real obstacle.

After more splashing around, almost capsizing again after slipping on some big rounded stones, I decided to go back, to give up, very reluctantly. Without really articulating it beforehand (all I wanted to do was follow Cuthbert as closely as possible), I suppose I saw the wading of the river as a form of informal baptism into his world. But like bridges, fords need to be maintained. The spates of centuries of winters had probably shifted what shallow footing there had been, as the great river reclaimed its natural course. In winter, crossing must have been impossible, as rain and snow swelled the current. Boats would have been the only option. For me there was nothing for it but to be sensible, wade back to the bank to dry off, put my jeans, socks and boots back on, and retrace my steps back to the Temple of the Muses and the footbridge below it.

I had barely begun this journey with Cuthbert but had already seen several reverses and false starts. But in one sense at least I felt I had been close to him. On the road from Brotherstone, I had met no one. On a sunny July morning I had enjoyed a few hours of real peace as I moved through the summer landscape, something I would come to think of as the peace of Cuthbert.

Recently refurbished, the footbridge looked splendid. The views up and downstream revealed broad areas of white, dried-out river boulders and stones below the overgrown banks, but even though the water was low the channel under the bridge seemed deep.

After I had crossed, I came upon a small car park. Signs told me this was a section of St Cuthbert’s Way. Beginning at Melrose Abbey, then climbing the saddle between Eildon Hill North and Eildon Mid Hill, descending to Newtown St Boswells before going on to the village of Bowden, it is not a way Cuthbert would ever have come. But it does pass some beautiful views and, having climbed the long steps to the bank above the river, I came across a steady stream of walkers who were enjoying it, stopping often to take photographs on their phones. One bench had been set up to look north, and of course Eildon Hill North dominated the landscape.

After a long climb up a winding wooden stair, the path snaked through dense woodland above the river and footbridges had been built to cross the deeper wooded deans. After about half a mile, I saw that a recent gale labelled Storm Hector (why has this childish American habit of anthropomorphising destructive weather been adopted?) had blown down a big ash tree and it had landed squarely on a bench, pulverising it. There seemed to be a message there. The path occasionally forked and I found myself following it away from the river. Around a corner, I was suddenly assailed by the roar of traffic above me, a bridge carrying the trucks and cars of the busy A68. This riverside woodland suddenly felt like an underworld, parts of a palimpsest, layers below the thunder of the twenty-first century. A helicopter flew low, unseen, and it seemed to make the trees vibrate. The peace of Cuthbert was shattered and once more I decided to retrace my steps to look for a path by the riverbank.

When at last I emerged from the green shade of the woodland, I found I had been going not so much in circles but back and forth, so that I had only walked half a mile in half an hour, poor progress. The path by the Tweed had almost been overwhelmed by the broad leaves of hogweed, and when I eventually reached the bank opposite the ford it was very difficult to get close to the water to see how deep it was. I met a fisherman in chest-high waders who told me I had been wise to turn back. Not only was there no one about if I had got into difficulties, I had been standing on the edge of a salmon pool he had only ever thought it safe to fish from the bank or from the place where I had been splashing around in the shallows of the far side.

Some wooden signs and two inexplicable red and blue arrows suggested at least three directions of travel, but I wanted to stay in sight of the Tweed. Someone had taken the trouble to strim the long grass and nettles to open a track and I assumed that it led to Old Melrose. But after a few hundred yards it simply stopped dead on the edge of another deep pool. By this time, I could see the high bank where the river had turned to make its loop around Old Melrose. The site of the old monastery was close and after several reverses and many steps retraced, I did not want to turn back yet again and look for another path. The problem was the alternative – a climb up a high bank to my left. The map showed the woods running out into fields at the top; somewhere up there a track might be found.

There seemed to be plenty of saplings growing out of the slope, most of them as thick as my arm, and for about twenty feet I made good and careful progress. But then I had to swing across the face of the bank for a good handhold on a sapling that would lead me up what looked an easier route. But when I slipped on the damp, peaty earth I cannoned heavily into the little tree, hitting it with my chest. Unfortunately a hard plastic buckle on my rucksack was between me and the tree and I heard the unmistakable click of a rib snapping.

I knew that sound and what it felt like. Some years ago, when I had some money, I bought myself a splendid dapple-grey gelding. Standing almost seventeen hands, Sooty (daft name, I know, but he had black legs) could easily carry me and we enjoyed some memorable hacks in the countryside around our farm, and with a professional rider aboard he won the Novice Working Hunter class at the Ettrick and Yarrow Show. But one morning, in the arena next to the stables, I rode him without stirrups. Absolutely daft for such a poor rider. Instinctively I held on with my legs, squeezing him around the girth and, well schooled as he was, that sent him off into an abrupt canter and me flying out the side door. I fell hard and broke several ribs on my right-hand side. Exactly where the plastic buckle, me and the tree had collided. It hurt, but not so badly that I couldn’t make it to the top of the bank, and from there to the plateau of the river peninsula of Old Melrose. I wondered if repeated and inadvertent mortification of the flesh ranked alongside the self-inflicted torment practised by the monks who had crossed the ford and trodden the path to the diseart thirteen or more centuries before I made my undignified entrance.

Even more than the loop of the Tweed at Dryburgh, the river almost makes the peninsula an island at Old Melrose. Close to where I had scrambled up to the top of the bank, its course pinches tight, not quite joining, before it is pushed around 280 degrees by a massive river cliff gouged out by the glaciers of the last ice age. Near-vertical in places, it towers above the site of the monastery and adds to a powerful sense of enclosure. The topography of Old Melrose is surprising. Much of it is a high plateau that looks down on the river and affords a long southern vista to Monksford and Dryburgh; immediately below it is the fringe of a broad, grassy floodplain. Incongruously, there was a large canvas tipi pitched on it the day I arrived.

Now heavily wooded, the peninsula is part of a well-managed estate dominated by Old Melrose House. It stands on the highest point of the plateau, close to where the early medieval chapel of St Cuthbert was built, and around it are grass parks grazed by sheep and one or two horses. The buildings of the old dairy farm are bounded by woods and bright barley fields, early to ripen in this hot and sunny summer. Most of its byres are now converted into a tea room, a bookshop and an antiques shop. On the warm afternoon when I mortified one of my ribs, the discomfort was much eased by this beautiful, sylvan scene, a peaceful place that gave no hint of its ancient, austere existence.