All of these turning points revolved around the behaviour and needs of domesticated flocks and herds and the rhythms of a stock-rearing society. Weather mattered to our ancestors even more than it does for modern farmers. Three thousand years ago there were no large byres to overwinter cattle, there was little or no shelter from the winter’s blast other than the folds of the land or the leafless trees of the wildwood. Severe snow, ice and cold, wind-driven rain saw many animals die and a parched summer could mean that they did not put on condition. To judge their prospects, farmers looked to the sky, and it seems that by the first millennium BC it was also where they looked for the gods that would help them rear their beasts and bring home their harvests safely.
Priest-kings climbed Eildon Hill North on the Celtic feast days to be nearer to their pantheon and to be seen by the divine beings who in some way controlled what happened on the Earth, who sent good and bad fortune, who sent snow, wind, rain or sun. They were sky gods, and the great enclosure on Eildon Hill North was not a fortress but a sky temple.
The Brothers’ Stones do not stand on the highest part of their hill. To the west, there is a rocky outcrop, which hid the second stone as I approached up the farm track, and I sat down there to look at and think about the relationship of the great temple and the stones, if there was one. And how all of this might have been understood by Cuthbert.
The stones were probably dragged up Brotherstone Hill a long time before the ditches were dug on Eildon Hill North, perhaps a thousand or even two thousand years before. But I cannot think that this concentration of monuments was an accident. Perhaps the link was simple – the sky. Thunder, lightning and the drama of the weather have long been associated with the gods and their moods, and on Brotherstone Hill there is no better place to watch it change or settle, not even from the sky temple. Eildon Hill North does not have all-round panoramic views. Instead its longest vistas stretch to the east, to the twin stones and the Cow Stone at the foot of the slope. They felt and looked to me like a gateway, the doors of some sort of lost perception. I am very sceptical about all of the musings of those who follow ley-lines and other invisible trigonometry in the landscape, and I know I am straying perilous close, but there did seem to be some sort of alignment between the summit of Eildon Hill North, the Brothers’ Stones and the Cow Stone.
Cuthbert cannot have been insensitive to the ghosts of the pagan past that swirled around the hill where he tended sheep. Both the Anonymous Life and Bede’s speak of his missions of conversion, his attempts to defeat pagan belief in the Borders, in the hills around Melrose, persuading country people to turn away from amulets and incantations and back to the love of Christ. And yet the stones may still have been venerated in some way. Perhaps the young shepherd saw Brotherstone Hill as a Christian sky temple, a spiritual vantage point over the valley of the great river, the place where he could clearly see angels descend and ascend with the glowing orb of fire that was Aidan’s soul. What modern eyes might have seen as an eclipse, a rare Blood Moon, where the sun turns its milky white surface to red, might have seemed like a vision to Cuthbert, metaphor rather than reality, the Earth and the celestial phenomena around it as themselves divine.
Turning over these half-formed notions about the sacred earth, the hallowed ground, a place where saints had walked, I sat for a long time by the old stones, watching cloud shadows chase across the sunlit fields before disappearing into the folds of the hills. Even though the account of Cuthbert’s vision is infused with biblical tropes, from Jacob’s dream of the stairway to heaven at Bethel in the Old Testament to the shepherds tending their flocks at night on the eve of the Nativity in the New, I was thinking about something beyond the scriptural. Below me, on the lower slopes of the hill, a flock of newly shorn ewes were bent over the sweet grass of fresh pasture, the lambs almost as big as their mothers. Thirteen centuries since the boy woke his fellow shepherds to tell them what he had seen in the sky, sheep were still grazing on Brotherstone Hill. And the skies above were still immense and dramatic.
When I ask myself a pressing question, more and more pressing on the threshold of my eighth decade, about what I believe, the provisional answer has nothing to do with the divine, a Christian god or any other, or indeed any conventional hope of an afterlife. I believe in an immortality of a different sort: the immortality of continuity, especially continuity in the same place. I will live on through the lives and memories of my children and their children. Even though that will fade in time, perhaps in only three generations, there will be a pile of dusty books somewhere with their forewards, dedications, blurbs and contents where some sense of my life and what I thought can be assembled. If anyone is interested.
With Cuthbert, even though there is no certain way to know his ancestral DNA, I feel that because mine is also Anglian, we have a direct connection. And on that warm and sunny day on the hill, I felt I could hear him on the edge of the wind, murmuring his prayers, looking up at what I was looking at, searching the sky for angels. But he could not have known that he was gazing upon a large part of what would become known as St Cuthbert’s Land, a place where dozens of churches would be dedicated to him and where, for 1,000 years, documents would carry the phrase ‘for St Cuthbert and for God’. And I did not know until that moment my journey had actually begun. I hoped the shepherd boy would lead me down the hill and that I could walk with his shadow to the monastery at Old Melrose.
3
In the Sacred Land
It had been a parched summer, the hottest and longest for more than forty years, with the sun beating down almost every day since the beginning of May. After a six-month winter, with the last snowfall in early April, the landscape was flooded with welcome light and warmth.
Temperatures climbed steadily and reached ninety degrees Fahrenheit in the last week of July. For weeks on end we sweltered in the high seventies and eighties, and virtually no rain fell. But then one evening the heat suddenly became very oppressive, and over the dark heads of the southern hills gunmetal-grey clouds quickly gathered. Far in the distance, thunder rumbled. By 9 p.m. it had grown very dark, and after a few spots it began to rain torrentially. While we ran around the farmhouse closing windows, there was a tremendous crack of thunder directly overhead that made us all flinch instinctively and sheet lightning lit the black sky.
An overnight downpour began, the raindrops huge, and it had a dramatic effect around the farmhouse, especially on the track. In towns and cities, heavy rain falls on hard surfaces – roofs, tarmac and pavements – and is usually taken away by efficient drainage. When it stops, and especially if the sun shines afterwards, it is as though it has never fallen. Here, heavy rain leaves its mark for many days. Much of the rammed earth and pebbles, compacted by vehicle wheels, hooves and feet, was washed away, exposing the stones of the old track, like Roman cobbles. It was worst down at the house, where the velocity of the flow was strongest. I could see that the downpour of the previous night had created a miniature water world, a network of tiny river channels, oxbows, deltas, lakes and dams, something that would delight a child. The bottom track is about a 15% gradient and 120 yards long, and so when the little rivers of rain reached the bend around the gable end of the old house, they had considerable force and carried a lot of pebbles and silt with them. As the camber forced the rainwater to turn, it cut out little river cliffs two or three inches high, as the fine silt piled up. It was like speeded-up land formation, millions of years of geology recreated by one night of torrential rain.
By the time I took the dogs out at 6.30 a.m., the sky had cleared and a watery sun