Holy Island has an unreality about it: earthly but not; an island but not always; cast adrift but not. It was a crucible of early christianity on these islands but, one feels, remote even then. People travelled there but were not from it. The -farne in the name (held in common with all of the Farne Islands of which it is one) may come from the Old English fearena, meaning traveller. In Old Welsh the island was Medcaut, ultimately from the same root as medicine, apparently because of the preponderance of healing herbs and, presumably, monks with the knowledge to use them.
The first of those monks was Aidan, an Irish monk sent down from Iona to found a monastery at the request of Oswald, King of Northumbria. Cuthbert later became Bishop of Lindisfarne. An anonymous life of Cuthbert written on the island is the oldest extant piece of English historical writing. So holy is the place, it remained a progenitor of saints for centuries. In its quiet and cold the Lindisfarne Gospels were written.
This history is all fine, but it is the atmosphere of the place I love. The enormous sky, grey and streaked like an inexpert watercolour, and the tight packed ruins; long walks in the whip of the North Sea wind; St. Cuthbert’s island - one tidal isolation insufficient for his asceticism - with a defiant cross, where on school biology trips we came poking around at dreary lichen. There are good pubs of course, and whole alphabets of whisky, sent down from Scotland like Irish saints. Perhaps they ought to make their own. But this is not an island where wealth is hoarded; it is an island from which wealth, spiritual, cultural or gleaming gold, is taken.
The mysterious energy of the place, to use Walter Scott’s word from his Lindisfarne poem (below), is “unsubdued”. Perhaps better pronounced in a Scots accent to rhyme with stood.
On the deep walls the heathen Dane
Had poured his impious rage in vain;
And needful was such strength to these,
Exposed to the tempestuous seas,
Scourged by the winds’ eternal sway,
Open to rovers fierce as they,
Which could twelve hundred years withstand
Winds, waves, and Northern pirates’ hand.
Not but that portions of the pile,
Rebuilded in a later style,
Showed where the spoiler’s hand had been;
Not but the wasting sea-breeze keen
Had worn the pillar’s carving quaint,
And mouldered in his niche the saint,
And rounded, with consuming power,
The pointed angles of each tower;
Yet still entire the abbey stood,
Like veteran, worn, but unsubdued.
Lindisfarne. I love Lindisfarne.