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Author’s Note

One of my most treasured possessions is a small cache of letters. Written in a looping, spidery hand with sentences that turn corners up the sides of pages before abruptly dipping overleaf, they are full of criticism and advice. The writer was a retired librarian and borrower of all my books but I never knew his or her name. Received over a four-year period, all of the letters were signed A Reader and no return address appeared at the top of the first of many pages. Not that there was room for one.

The last letter was never posted. It arrived inside another envelope with a compliments slip from a care home in Berwick-upon-Tweed. I took it that my critic had died before the letter could be dispatched and something prevented me from calling the care home to ask for a name. He or she had not wished to give it and I felt I ought to respect that.

Most of the criticism was a helpful mixture of pointing out blunders, a wrong date or mistaken identity and suchlike, and there were occasional comments on inaccurate use of language and poor style. ‘Posterity is not an interchangeable term for history’ and ‘using a dash is simply slovenly’ or ‘try not to over-use the ablative absolute at the beginning of a paragraph’.

His or her advice was to try to understand better the importance of place in history and to get out from in front of my screen and visit the sites of important events or where important people passed their lives. One letter surprised me by suggesting (or maybe insisting) that I should read the opening chapter of Daphne du Maurier’s Frenchman’s Creek, ‘a delicate and enchanting evocation of place and how it has been seen differently over the centuries’.

Before I began work on this book, I took this unexpected advice and re-read Frenchman’s Creek. I was indeed enchanted once more. At the peak of her powers, du Maurier wrote about the Helford River mouth on the Cornish coast and the inlet that gave her novel its title. Almost cinematic in its imagery, the opening chapter is intensely atmospheric, a world of winds, tides and a silence broken only by the call of nightjars. Du Maurier moves seamlessly between Restoration England and the twentieth century, establishing Navron House, the central location, and then, six pages in, the story begins with the reader transported almost trance-like back to the past. It is magical and masterly.

What my critical correspondent from Berwick was suggesting, if that is not too mild a verb, was that a deeper understanding of place would enhance the dry recital of dates and events that form the framework of a historical narrative. And more, it would make a powerful link between the present and even the deep past. Fernand Braudel, the great French historian, wrote of the longue durée, the notion that peoples in similar geographical, social and economic circumstances maintain habits of life and mind over vast reaches of time. If a sense of a place, its atmosphere as much as its topography and climate, could be caught and understood, then history would come alive.

About twelve years ago I was making a TV series on the history of Tyneside, a part of the world I am very fond of, and we were filming at Durham Cathedral. Setting up to shoot a sequence around the shrine of St Cuthbert, we were joined by the stern lady who ran the administration of the great church. I imagine she was checking that we were behaving ourselves. When she pronounced Cuthbert the greatest English saint, I felt compelled to point out that he had been born and raised in what is now Scotland. Before I could add that the border did not exist in the seventh century, she exclaimed, ‘Nonsense! Utter nonsense,’ and stormed off back down the nave. We packed up our gear, eventually completed the series and I moved on to another project. But I never forgot that exchange. Thirteen centuries after his death, Cuthbert’s exemplary life still attracted fierce loyalty, even passion, to say nothing of contested history. One day I would find the time to write about him.

In 2017, that day came when I began to think seriously about this book. I am no Christian, but sainthood and how it was and is achieved interests me very much. Heroes and heroic actions I can understand and admire, but the journey from ordinary life to an elevated, demi-godlike state is something I wanted to know more about. Cuthbert lived from approximately 635 to 687, a time of seismic cultural shifts in Britain, the period often known as the Dark Ages because of the dearth of extant written record. As Anglo-Saxon invaders became settlers who supplanted and submerged Celtic society over much of lowland Britain, languages were exchanged and enduring identities forged. It was a time of great, largely unreported turmoil.

Cuthbert is an Anglian name and he may have been born into the first or second generation of a landed family who settled in the Tweed Valley. I knew that around 651 he entered the monastery at Old Melrose, where he took holy orders. After some years there, he travelled east to the Holy Island of Lindisfarne, became prior of the monastery and eventually bishop before dying in his hermitage on the little island of Inner Farne. I thought that if I could understand something of his journey through life and, as importantly, through the landscape, then I might be able to move close to a sense of the man who walked with God.

I wanted to go to Lindisfarne, a deeply atmospheric place I have come to love, having visited it half a dozen times over the years. Now, its peace and spirituality seem even more to be valued, as political chaos swirls around us, as we blunder through the wilderness of a divisive and bitter world that seems at times to be irretrievably broken. And so I decided on what would become two journeys.

To be closer to Cuthbert, I wanted to walk where he walked and spend time in the places where he passed his life. I would begin at Old Melrose and travel down the banks of the Tweed to its confluence with the River Till before following Cuthbert inland to the moors of northern Northumberland. Once over the Kyloe Hills, I would find the coast and cross the causeway to Lindisfarne to complete what might be called a secular pilgrimage.

I also wanted to make the journey for myself. While walking in the shadow of Cuthbert and trying to understand his faith and the extreme lengths he went to in pursuit of piety and purity of thought and deed, I would also think about my own life. The contrast between his asceticism and beliefs and my lack of either could not have been more stark, but I hoped very much that I might learn something from Cuthbert.

And, dear Reader, I am sad not to be able to point out to you that no paragraph in this introduction begins with an ablative absolute, although I do recall that you also disliked sentences that begin with conjunctions.