News from Nowhere

There will be more, and not too far off; but for now, it's over and we are back home.

D. researched restaurants in Berwick, and we booked Sunday lunch for the four of us at Audela (so called because it is immediately beyond the Old Bridge, though only if you approach from the south, which on this occasion we didn't). The causeway closed at 10.20 am, so we took both cars, and did our own thing: D. and valydiarosada visited a stately home (Paxton House), while durham_rambler and I visited the Union Chain Bridge for the first time since its renovation, and walked across it into Scotland. Since we still had some time, we drove further into Scotland, to Eyemouth (where once upon a time we used to breakfast after watching the sunrise - but that was long ago and much has changed since then).

Lunch was delightful. They offered a slightly incongruous mixture of haute cuisine and traditional Sunday roast, but I took my own advice, and had two starters: a very rich crab risotto with a sweet and juicy scallop on the top, a piece of chicken confit on an assortment of vegetables (less successful, and over-salt to my taste, which errs in that direction anyway); and a dessert which called itself cranachan but was unlike any cranachan I have met before, more raspberries than whisky cream, with a scattering of some sort of granola, all concealing an intense, ruby, sorbet. A glass of Puglian white wasn't earth-shattering, but refreshing and went well.

After which, Sunday afternoon was Sunday afternoon: I may even have slept, briefly. Later, I sat at the kitchen table writing the previous post, and thinking that the sky was getting darker and perhaps I wouldn't go for a walk after all - and then I saw this:



The building is the island's sewage pumping station, halfway between our cottage and the castle. It seemed like an appropriate 'last photo' (though I may post others in due course...

Yesterday, we stopped at Alnmouth on the way home.

A couple of small irritations, which need to be written about, apparently, just to get them out of my system:

( Customer service fail I: Majestic )

Yesterday durham_rambler and I did not leave the island, but went our separate ways, wandering about each at our preferred speed and distance. I went down to St Cuthbert's island:



and spent a peaceful while sitting on a bench listening to the seals mooing to each other on the far shore - and trying and failing to spot the oystercatcher(s) I could also hear.

( Customer service fail II: the Crown & Anchor )

I did not get up at 4.00 am to watch the sun rising: but D. assures me that it did so, before the mist closed in. Another solstice past, and the nights begin to grow longer.

durham_rambler and I both had baths this morning. That's probably the most exciting thing that has happened all day, especially for durham_rambler, who cannot remember when he last had a bath: given a choice he takes the shower every time, whereas I mix and match. Our cottage has two bathrooms, but since valydiarosada prefers the level access of a shower, we took the one with a bath, and an understanding that we could also use the shower. Today, though, D. and valydiarosada were making an early start to visit their friend in Edinburgh, so I determined not to be intimidated by the bath, imposing though it is:



Once I had discovered all its funny little ways (including the cunningly hidden plug, can you spot it in the picture?), durham_rambler also took the plunge, and emerged unscathed.

The rest of the day has been quiet: too hot for my liking. There is a heat warning out, apparently, though not for the north east of England. Doesn't matter, I am on holiday, and entitled to take things easy. We crossed to the mainlland, and shopped at Belford, where there is both a farm shop and a Co-op; we lunched on crab sandwiches at the Ship; we strolled around the village, decided we were too hot (and too full of crab sandwiches) for ice cream; we came home and did more nothing-in-particular...

It's my turn to cook tonight: I should probably get started.

Friday's talk was organised by something called the North-East England History Research Cluster (this, I think) and was announced as the first in a series, of which the second will be about Sam Green. The first topic was a complete contrast, but also a subject I find interesting Rethinking late 1st Millenium Durham & Lindisfarne.

Since the speaker was David Petts, from the Department of Archaeology, and specifically since he was running the recent excavations on Lindisfarne with DigVentures, I was expecting him to focus on the archaeological evidence, which has produced unexpected signs of monastic life on Lindisfarne after the arrival of the Vikings. And that certainly fed into his argument, but the focus was very much on the historical record (and on physical objeects which were already known). He began his story, as is proper, with the life of Saint Cuthbert. I have read a lot of Lives of medieval saints in my time, as a literary genre, but it takes a historical mind to point out that one reason why Cuthbert became so important is that the Synod of Whitby had taken the Northumbrian church into the orbit of Rome, and Irish patrons like Aidan were no longer appropriate - the community on Lindisfarne needed a new patron, and there was Cuthbert, dying just when they needed him.

The 'origin story' of Durham Cathedral is that when the Vikings raided Lindisfarne in 793, the monks gathered up everything portable (including Cuthbert's remains) and fled, initially to Norham, then wandering all over the North, until they finally came to Durham, a previously empty site. Even discounting the miracles by which the saint made it clear that this was his chosen resting place, the decorative details like the maiden with the dun cow, this doesn't entirely work. You wouldn't, for example, run away from the Vikings by retreating a mere 15 miles up a navigable river. Archaeology is turning up evidence of a continued presence on Lindisfarne, but even before the recent dig, catalogues of Saxon crosses have for some time been pointing to continuity.

Back in the autumn, I visited the local museum in Chester-le-Street, and among the things I learned from the presentation there was that the community of Saint Cuthbert had extensive land holdings, and that the period of wandering may have been more a case of visiting their various properties. David Petts said the same thing, though he didn't confirm that Chester-le-Street was one of them: "I haven't given this talk in Chester-le-Street yet," he said. I'd love to be there when he does. What I wrote at the time was:

... because those monks didn't just break their journey in Chester-le-Street, they stayed for over a hundred years. They built a cathedral here, before anyone had even heard of Durham. The earliest translation of the gospels into English was written here by someone called Aldred, who inscribed his glass between the lines of the Lindisfarne Gospels. King Alfred made a pilgrimage here (as did Athelstan, Canute, and several Scottish kings).

And I concluded "It's very refreshing to have your perspective so thoroughly shaken up." It is, indeed.

In the Guardian, an article by writer Benjamin Myers considers how Durham - his "home town" - has changed "during 14 years of Tory rule". It's one of a short series on the theme, which strikes me as a little random, both the question itself and Myers's answer, but never mind. I liked: "Gone is the Marks & Spencer where I first discovered escalators and hummus."

There are a number of differences between the print and online versions of the article, starting from the headline, but let's not go down that rabbit hole; this post isn't about that, although the "escalators and hummus" made me feel (slightly) more tempted by Benjamin Myers's novel Cuddy.

This is Cuddy:



- more formally, Saint Cuthbert of Farne, as depicted by Fenwick Lawson, and stationed at Lindisfarne Priory. While I was waiting to show my card for admission to the priory, I overheard the custodian answering the ladies ahead of me: yes, that was where the bodies were found, the altar would have been just over there. And yes, the ruins had been in the care of English Heritage for quite some time, but it wasn't impossible to get in at night, you could climb over the wall from the garden of the pub, people did occasionally ... I wasn't unduly alarmed by this talk of bodies on altars, because I was pretty sure we were talking about a series of crime novels set on Holy Island: I had read the first few chapters of the first one, as a free sample somewhere, and felt no urge to get hold of and read the rest of it.

When my turn came, I asked the custodian, who confirmed that this was, indeed, what they were taoling about. He had read the books, he said, because he made a point of reading books about Holy Island, but he hadm't thought much of them. His preference was for non-fictionm he explained, but - and he produced his current reading matter - right now he was reading Benjamin Myers's Cuddy, and finding it quite dense going. But he persevered.

I was disproportionately cheered by this unscheduled book talk, and had to bite my tongue not to launch into enthusing about my own current reading (there were more visitors behind me, awaiting admission). I had already started Madeline Miller's Circe, which I had bought a dew days earlier in Berwick: I had been looking for her The Song of Achilles, which boybear had recomended, and found this instead. Without that pointer, I probably wouldn't have been tempted: the back cover quotes The Times: "Miller's Me-too era, kickass portrait of a woman trying to defy the men and Fates array against her ..." and I am not drawn to the feminist-retelling, all history must be the same, version of the past. I enjoy the strangeness, not the familiarity. Which only reinforces my belief that you should never look at the back cover until you are at least halfway through the book, because while Circe is, I suppose, as described, it also presents the Gods and Titans of myth in a way that was both entirely new and entirely familiar. I don't know enough about Greek myth to know how much is invention, how much has a Classical - or post-Classical - source, but it felt entirely convincing: as if it was both a single organic invention and the result of deep knowledge of its source material. It is, in short, one of those books that you want to talk to people about.

On Wednesday, after a short wander around the island and a little light shopping, I was mostly back at base: I bought postcards, I wrote (some of) them.

Yesterday, though, we did something new, and visited Ad Gefrin. Rather than try to compose my own one-line explanation, here's the headline from their website: Ad Gefrin is an "Anglo-Saxon Museum and Whisky Distillery in the heart of Northumberland."

Not far from the Northumberland town of Wooler is - if I have got this right - an Iron Age hill fort called Yeavering Bell. It's a wonderful name, and it is derived from the Celtic 'gefrin', hill of goats. This is not what we visted. Between the hill and the river is another archaeological site - well, actually the whole valley is rich in archaeology, but there is one particular site, spotted by aerial photography in 1949 and excavated in the second half of the twentieth century, which has been identified as the summer palace of the kings and queens of Anglo-Saxon Northumbria. We didn't visit that, either, but the museum and distillery which we did visit is not far away, and celebrates that palace. And when I say 'celebrates' I mean that it has a magnificent new building, and that it goes overboard on the Anglo-Saxon theme. All the notices are in two languages. My favourite is:



( More pictures - )

ETA:( Recent discoveries... )

tl:dr; The site remains an interesting and omportant one, but was not, in the Anglo-Saxon period, altogether as shown at the museum. Bede, on the other hand, is a more reliable historic source than you might expect.

The weather, as forecast, is mixed: patches of beautiful sunshine, and sudden showers. Monday morning did not look promising, so we started with a visit to the Museum, which is in run by English Heritage as an introduction to the Priory, and has been much revamped since our last visit, three years ago. It is distinctly a museum of two halves - three, if you count the gift shop, and you probably should. You enter through the historical section: information boards about Northumbria's golden age, the kings and the saints and the coming of the Vikings.. a fine collection of carved stones, and one tiny piece of blue glass, the size of a child's thimble. When you have passed through this gallery, you find yourself in a darkened space hung with representations of Holy Island, dominated by a multimedia piece by Olivia Lomenech-Gill, whose images of wild creatures form a sort of nature trail through the museum. It's a map of the island, mashed up with drawings and collaged treasures and scraps of text from Katrina Porteous's poem The Refuge Box (extract here) which plays on a loop in the gallery. Did I like the image? I couldn't really see it as a whole. But I enjoyed getting right up close to the glass and looking at all the little details:



( Between the two... )

After the museum, a quick visit to the Priory, cut short by the rain. We took refuge in the church, and then made a dash to the Post Office and bought supplies for lunch. In the afternoon the sunshine lured me out, solo this time, and I wandered down to the harbour, where the rain caught me again, and I sat it out in the shelter of the Window on Wild Lindisfarne, watching the swallows swooping past - and under, for the one brave swallow who had nested there. By the time I got home, the sun was hot.

It is midsummer week, and we are back on Lindisfarne. There was the usual flurry of not-ready-ness, but in the end things worked out. We even made it to Midsummer Phantoms, which was early this year and so didn't fall while we are away. And although I didn't actually pack anything until today, I had done enough preparation that we were away at one o' clock, and reached the island before D. and valydiarosada, who had made detours for shopping and sightseeing.

Another year, another cottage: this year we are in Britannia Cottage (not the house on the green with 'Britannia' blazoned across it, but the rather more compact cottage at right angles to it). We are immediately across the road from the mead factory, which has already proved handy, when D. discovered there were only three wine glasses; he was able to buy another in the shop there. Now he is in the kitchen cooking dinner, and there is a constant running commentary of "lemon squeezer - lemon squeezer - isn't there a... parsley - oh, I forgot the parsley - shewhomust, did you bring any olive oil?"

Yes, I did. Also black pepper and a corkscrew. So far, I have discovered that I have forgotten the olive oil spread for my breakfast toast, and the motion sensitive nightlight. Of these, the latter is the worse omission, especially since the bathroom is downstairs. Oh, well, we will cope. Now I should probably go upstairs and unpack.

We have had a lovely sunny day walking around Berwick, and I'm going to go and be sociable now instead of writing all about it. This picture seems to sum it up, though (that's the Royal Border - railway - Bridge, in case you wondered, and no, it isn't the border).

I went out again after dinner to enjoy the last of the light. Evenings can be spectacular here, but this one was just gently pearly and calm. I walked round the church to the lane which leads down to the beach - and took the footpath into the field for a better view of St Cuthbert's island, but didn't carry on all the way down (there were dog walkers on the beach, but that's not why, I just didn't). A white froth of sweet cicely in the fields, and now and then a taller plant reaching for the moon:



This morning durham_rambler and I took up his booking to visit the priory, before the causeway opened. We didn't have it to ourselves, quite, but it wasn't crowded, and we drifted around at our leisure, then spent some time sitting on a bench chatting, next to the sculpture of St Cuthbert.



Think of this as the flip side of yesterday's photo, the view back from the priory across the poppies to the castle, past the harbour and the house we rented the first few times we stayed on the island, long ago ...