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To the Island of Tides. Alistair Moffat
Читать онлайн.Название To the Island of Tides
Год выпуска 0
isbn 9781786896339
Автор произведения Alistair Moffat
Жанр Биология
Издательство Ingram
Probably a Gaelic-speaking Irish monk who came with Aidan from Iona when he founded the mother house at Lindisfarne in 631, Boisil is sometimes credited with the establishment of the first community at Old Melrose. But as Bede was careful to note, he was not abbot and not able to admit Cuthbert without permission from Eata. Unlike his contemporaries, Boisil may have adopted his name. It is a Gaelicised version of Basil. An early bishop who led a famously ascetic life in the provinces of the Near East, what was becoming the Byzantine Empire in the fourth century, St Basil fought against heresy but eventually died, exhausted and enfeebled by the fasting and rigours of his exemplary life.
Boisil’s own piety was much revered, and not only by Cuthbert. Three miles to the south of Old Melrose lie the villages of St Boswells and Newtown St Boswells, both named to honour the old monk. Their local pronunciation seems to get closer to him. Borderers call St Boswells, Bowzuls. At Benrig, a pretty hamlet half a mile from the older village, there once stood St Boisil’s Chapel, only demolished in 1952. And a further link with Old Melrose was embedded in an ancient place-name. St Boswells used to be know as Lessudden, and it means ‘the place of Aidan’. How and when one was supplanted by the other is long forgotten, but what the names signify was probably ownership. At some point in the history of Old Melrose, beginning soon after Cuthbert’s coming, land was gradually gifted to the monks in return for certain privileges.
In the early Middle Ages and beyond, the idea of holy ground was not metaphorical. Where holy men had walked and prayed was literally physically sanctified and if a body was buried inside the monastic precinct of Old Melrose, and indeed many other sites where monks or priests had defeated demons and made the land sacred, it was believed that the earth itself would wash away mortal sin as the flesh rotted down to bone. Wealthy people were prepared to give lavish gifts in return for burial beyond the monastic vallum.
Much later, Anglo-Norman noblemen sometimes endowed a monastery on condition that they be admitted to the community as novices as the end of their days drew near. That meant they were guaranteed burial inside the sacred precinct, perhaps even under the floor of the church and close to the high altar. This was known as taking vows ad succurrendum, which translates as ‘at the run’ or ‘in a hurry’. Robert Avenel, Lord of Eskdale and Richard de Morville of Lauder both became novices at the new abbey of Melrose and were buried under the floor of the church. Such privileges did not come cheap, and in 1216 Sir Alan Mortimer made over half of his estate to the old diseart that became the abbey of Inchcolm in the Firth of Forth if the monks would allow him to be buried in the church.
After re-reading Bede’s account of Cuthbert’s coming to the monastery, I walked through the sunshine up the road to Old Melrose House. It sits close to the highest point of the plateau and stands at what was the heart of the seventh-century community. In a copse beyond the house lie the ruins of an early medieval chapel dedicated to St Cuthbert. Under the shade of the trees, there is nothing much to see now; the only animation came from a group of small and excitable pigs (perhaps they thought I had come to feed them) who woke from their slumber in the warm afternoon to run around their pen as I passed.
Encircling the house and its knoll are wide, tree-fringed grass parks with nothing upstanding, no archaeological remains of any kind. It was as though the old monastery had never existed and the land had always been the leafy policies of a country house. Horses were grazing contentedly and nearby someone had set up showjumps in a practice area. But some sense of what once stood there can be found in Bede’s work. He described Old Melrose’s mother house of Lindisfarne as a very simple group of monastic cells probably made from wattle and daub with a wooden church near the centre of the precinct that had at first been roofed with reeds. There were probably one or two communal buildings, a cemetery and several fields for crops and pens for animals. All was enclosed by a monastic vallum.
The arrangement for Old Melrose is likely to have been similar: its wooden buildings all of wood; the monks’ cells made from wattle and daub walls, and the chapel and other communal spaces from timber, all perishable. However, under the lush grass my old friend Walter Elliot has traced the watermark of sanctity.
Using an ancient method, Walter has brought the site back to life, discovering a great deal about what the monastery may have looked like and indeed what happened on the river peninsula long before the monks came to the promontory.
Walter is a diviner. Through his business as a fencing contractor, he found he was able to pinpoint all manner of underground features without the use of a shovel, using instead two metal coat hangers (or pieces of fence wire bent at right angles) held loosely in his fists. Much less energy-sapping and time-consuming than digging, and far more precise. Post-holes show up very readily, as well as water courses and pits, and as his fascination with history and archaeology developed, Walter began to walk across sites with his rods in his fists where he suspected there were the remains of buildings now lost in the grass. And he finds them. I have seen him do it time and again. And as they swing around, what the rods tell him is confirmed by subsequent investigation. Why it works, no one (including Walter) is sure. But it does.
Particularly in dry summers, aerial photographs can reveal what is invisible on the ground. In 1983, the Royal Commission for Ancient and Historic Monuments initiated a survey that included Old Melrose. Studying the subsequent photographs, Walter noticed a series of faint circular markings in the grass parks to the north-west of the wooded knoll, the site of St Cuthbert’s Chapel and the estate house, that he reckoned to be the centre of the old monastery. When he walked slowly over the park with divining rods, quartering the ground carefully and noting and pegging what showed up as ground disturbance as he went, Walter found that the faint circles were in fact low banks and concentric rings of post-holes that enclosed areas that varied in diameter from approximately thirty feet to eighty feet. And beyond the edges of these circles were rows of rectangular pits that very closely resembled the outlines of graves.
Across Britain, archaeologists have discovered traces of similar structures. It seemed highly likely that on the site of the monastery Walter had found something much older, what is known as a wood henge. The most famous lies two miles to the south of Stonehenge in Wiltshire and it was first detected as faint circular markings by an aerial survey carried out in 1925. Later investigation revealed that Woodhenge was raised in the third millennium BC, and was still a focus of worship and ceremonial of some unknowable sort in 1800 BC.
Far easier and faster to build than stone henges, the function of these places was mysterious – but their essential nature unambiguous. Henges appear to have been first dug in Orkney as ditches and banks marked around by standing stones (more plentiful than trees in the Northern Isles) that served as temples of some kind. And just like the monastic vallum at Old Melrose and elsewhere, the circles of felled trees or quarried stones and their banks and ditches were set up as a means of separating the sacred ground from the temporal world around them. The simple duality of inside and outside was already present, something that persisted well into modern times. The mysteries of the mass took place behind a screen in abbeys, churches and cathedrals for many centuries and were heard but not seen by the lay congregation. Something of a similar sort may have taken place thousands of years before at henges. Those inside enacted rituals and sacrifices, probably chanted and played music, lit fires in the winter darkness and processed out through a throng of people who had heard but not witnessed the ceremonies.
If Walter Elliot has indeed discovered a series of wood henges at Old Melrose, that means something simple and very moving. The river peninsula had been revered as a holy place for more than two or three thousand years before the monks came from Lindisfarne. And if the rectangular pits arranged around them like the spokes of a wheel are indeed graves, then the desire to be buried in sacred ground was neither a purely Christian practice or new to the early Middle Ages. And what is even more intriguing are the reasons why a prehistoric, pagan culture wanted to bury its dead close to sacred ground.