LINDISFARNE

Evening Star, Issue 19710, 10 November 1927, Page 9

LINDISFARNE

THE PRIORY OF HOLY ISLAND [From, ‘The Times.] It is a chancy business to plan to spend a day picnicking on Holy Island. Sometimes it rains in this Border country, and the resources of the island on a wet day are limited. At all times you can only cros£ to or from tho mainland between tides. If you go over at, say, 11 o’clock in the morning, you will either have to return by 4 or thereabouts or wait until 9 at night. When the last tide has been a high one it leaves tho sands extremely messy. Motors cannot cross, but brakes and traps and country carta come over from the island to 'fetch the visitors, and you bump and rumble for three-quarters of an hour over the two miles of jolty sands, covered with anything up to a foot of water. The route is marked by a lino of tall .poles—rather as caravan routes are marked in some parts of tho African, desert —and at intervals are refuge boxes, things like largo packing cases without lids, perched on stilts about 101 b high, with a ladder to climb up by. People often walk across (you must be ba rc-legged to tho_ knees to do it), and the tide comes in over this level with unexpected suddenness. I asked a man, who had had the experience, what it felt like to spend six hours in a crate on stilts with the sea sloshing down below, and all tho description he could give was that it felt like being Noah. . But on a line day the trip is immensely worth making. In its religious associations Liudisfarue (and one cannot wonder that Scott was enamored of the name) ranks with lona and Glastonbury. It was to England much what the other little island, St. Honorat, in tho Lerins, was to Southern Europe. The Priory is believed to have been founded here by Aidan, a monk from lona, in G 34, and from it “ all the churches of Bernicia had their origin.” Here the holy St. Cuthbert was Bishop till he retired to his cell on one of the neighboring Fame Islands, in which, after having been again called into the world and again retiring, he died. What is said to have been the base of St. Cuthbert’s cross stands to-day, a great squared block of stone with a hollow in the middle, close by the Priory ruins, just outside tho walls of the massive old parish church, much of the fabric of which dates from tho twelfth century. The block is miown now as tbe Petting Stone; and tbe tradition is that every bride who was married here had to jump oyer the stone before she lcft._ We think our young girls are athletic and masculine to-day; but not many of them could jump’ that stone in a wedding dress. One suspects that there was a local rule which allowed the bride a step or two on tho top. The Priory ruins have been too often and too lavishly praised to need detailed . description. They are very beautiful; more beautiful than one would guess from Scott’s description: A solemn, huge, and dark red pile, Placed on the margin of the isle.

The “massive arches, short and round ” and ponderous columns, short and low ” were, doubtless, all there; but what is left of them—the one Jolty but low-pitched arch, the two lesser arches, the noble west door-—have a grace which the complete building, in vis frowning massiveness, must have lacked. In the afternoon sunlight the rosy glow of tho old stone againstrthe brilliant green turf is very lovely. Close by arc the remains of the monastic buildings, with walls 6ft thick, as was judicious, even in a religious house, in those troublous days. The whole place is admirably cared for, and down one side of the old monks’ garden, against the ancient wall, is a long narrow border so gay with charmingly contrasted flowers (arranged by some one who is a true gardener) that it would do credit to Hampton Court. As sweet a spot out here in this sea-beaten sand waste as is to be found in the British Isles.

Remote, sea-beaten, mostly waste as it is, the whole island has a singular attractiveness. From the grey straggling village, in width the few red roofs, though they brighten it, look somehow out of place, ou© wanders over the grasy hillocks where the old men, their fishing days over, sit looking through glasses out to sea past the low ridges of the Fame Islands and the dark mass of Hamburgh. Beyond is the ragged point—'the chief social gathering place of the island —beside the little harbor whore the fishing boats come in with tho tide and, when the tide is out, the seaweed-strewn flats are birdhaunted and the air is full of the cries of gulls and whimbrels’ whistlings. Across tho harbor, over another stretch of green, is. the Castle of Lindisfarnc, now restored and inhabited, perched on its crag so narrow that it looks as it it had been built—carefully moulded, as with human fingers—so as just to fit the castle and make it as conveniently inaccessible as it was desirable in those stormy times for a happy home to be. There are four or live little yachts riding off the harbor; and every year a certain number of wise people with children spend their summer season hero —there is accommodation enough fn the village—and, with rowing, sailing, fishing, bathing, and running wild among the dunes, there could hardly be a healthier holiday.