I may have vanished without trace for several days, but the aforsaid trace is now about to appear. I’m not going to tell you how we took the 9.34, Cousin Wilf is fine and has a new dog, Aunt Bessie has lost 40 pounds thanks to a new Great Horse-Punishing Diet from Kabiristan and all the other indispensible travel notes.

Nor write a cryptic poem. (Actually, I did in the end, but not directly about Holy Island)

 Instead, a short piece of prose about a feeling.

Holy Island has historical business dating back to the 7th century during which St. Aidan, one of the exponents of early English christianity, started a monastery there on land granted to him by the then King of Northumbria (635). (This was too early for kings of England, which didn’t yet exist). In 684, A certain Cuthbert, later Saint C, came to the abbey at Lindisfarne and was buried there in 687. The monks (supposedly?) dug his body up eleven years after his death, it was found not to have decomposed, and this, as much as his saintly life, contributed to the popularity of the abbey in the ensuing years.

In the ninth century, the Vikings were felt to be a threat to the abbey and as a result, following a precept of St Cuthbert, the monks abandoned the site. They then carried St C’s body around for a hundred years until eventually settling at Durham, where his body still rests.

The abbey fell into disuse and was eventually replaced by a priory after the Norman invasion of 1066. This priory in turn was dissolved by Henry the Eighth after his quarrel with Rome, and in 1570 some of the stone from it was used to build a fort on a volcanic knoll about a mile away. This was later upgraded to a castle during the reign of Elizabeth the First, but it never saw any major conflict.

What’s left of all this at the present time is a ruin – that of the Norman priory – and the Castle which was converted into a private home by the Edwardian architect Edwin Lutyens and eventually acquired by the National Trust in 1944.

Both castle and priory feature in the following image: 

  www.northeastengland.talktalk.net/Lindisfarne.htm

A feeling

Holy Island is thoroughly modernised: you drive your car (not mine in fact) over the causeway accessible at low tide and are obliged to park  on the edge of the village, which backs on to the priory ruins. The castle is beyond, towards the southern tip of the island, accessed only on foot.

I experienced a sense of well-being in this place. It felt very peaceful. The word is not the thing. Partly, there is this enormous sense of space – a virtual 360-degree horizon. Then, there is the smell of seaweed and the vitality of the air. Where we come from on the coast of the English Channel, we certainly have fresh air, but the sea is too polluted by constant shipping to allow much seaweed, and even the air, compared to that of Holy Island, seems to lack a certain zap.

All this contributes, but none of this is the core of the feeling. I experienced something similar on the island of Innisfree, off the coast of Ireland, many years ago. My friend the late John Mercer was in thrall to islands, and for me too, as for him, there is no doubting the sway that they hold over the heart and the imagination. This sense of peace, however, has me reaching back to a former time, an earlier age. It has about it the feel of monastic life and of the Middle Ages. It feels like something I have known, intimately, in a former life. There is a pain there, grief for what has gone irrevocably from these lands. Grief for a slow, green, quiet England that we shall not know again.