Holy Island

 

            It’s like I’m watching a clip from Night Cops. Four police officers are bundling one of the drunkest men in Britain into the back of a van, while his indignant mate remonstrates with them. The latter has a thick Slavic accent and a fearsome appearance, his mohican bringing to mind Robert De Niro in Taxi Driver. 

         The onlookers are themselves a strange bunch: Chinese tourists, locals from Northumberland, Scots, and a pair of foreign nuns in Mother Teresa-style blue and white garb. It’s a surprising time and place for such a scene: the middle of a Saturday afternoon in a hamlet on a small tidal island off the coast of North East England. 

         I had wanted to visit Lindisfarne, or Holy Island, for years. Driving south from Edinburgh to Newcastle I had often seen its castle looming just off shore. There was a sense of uniqueness about this thin strip of land, home to less than 200 people, which twice a day is cut off from the mainland as the North Sea swamps the connecting road. 

         The approach to the island is indeed a little special. You pass signs warning you to beware of the tides, then you follow a causeway over an expanse of sandy flats and tufty grassland. Pools of water left by the retreating sea lie on both sides, and dunes rise on your left as you skirt the edge of the island. Eventually, the houses of the small community at the southern end come into view ahead of you.   

         One of the most striking aspects of the place is its relative silence. Cars are few, and as you walk towards the castle, which sits upon a rocky crag like a miniature cousin of the famous strongholds of Edinburgh and Stirling, the sounds are amplified dramatically: the breaking of waves in the bay, birds calling, the soughing of the breeze. A man closing a door breaks the stillness like a gunshot.  

          It’s surprisingly easy to forget you are on an island, for the land is uneven, shielding the sea and the tidal flats from view. Despite the presence of large numbers of tourists and pilgrims who have reached the end of the 60 mile St Cuthbert’s walking route, there’s a bucolic feel: sheep and ponies chomp grass in the fields and a sign advertises free bags of horse manure. 

         Having sampled a tiny quantity of Lindisfarne’s honey-flavoured and syrupy mead I return to my car, wary of becoming trapped by the encroaching tide. Then again, would it be such a bad thing to be stranded for a night?