I’ve been crisscrossing the country again, to borrow from the late Sam Shepard – from Essex to west Wales, Atlantic Cornwall to the Yorkshire Dales, long drives going hand in hand with an apparent restlessness throughout this sun-struck summer. Longest was a pilgrimage of sorts up to the Northumberland island of Lindisfarne, with its cragstone castle, humpbacked dunes and ephemeral tidal causeway. It is a place, or a journey to a place, that I’d often thought about, as have countless people across the centuries, the island drawing pilgrims since its Christian founding in the seventh century. When it came to it, however, there was an unexpected particularity to the trip.
Two days before, my aging estate car had been in the garage with various afflictions, one of which remained unresolved – the compressor, or whatever it is that cools the air inside a car, was irreparable. Given the unprecedented heat, this meant driving almost every mile to Northumberland with the windows partially or all the way down, and the wind, rushing in, bringing with it every passing scent: toasted grass, earthy verge, concourse concrete redolent of the Mediterranean, each made more heady by the humid air.
Throughout the drive, which went through the evening and well into the night, I became aware of my sense of smell in a way I hadn’t for a long time. During the final leg, at around two a.m. on a winding lane somewhere near the county town of Morpeth, where moths floated thick into the headlights like fat winter snowflakes, there came a sudden and overwhelming scent of childhood. It was the smell of river water and a sweetness from some abundant wildflower in the passing hedgerows – meadowsweet or balsam, perhaps. A scent of wet, weed-smothered stones, muddy herbs and, strangely, of excited anticipation, all of which in an instant put me somewhere around eight years old and in the family cottage in Wales, the house beside the river, with the sense of something really good in store for the following day: the beach, or fishing the river with my dad, or a day-trip with the cousins.
Glancing at the map, I saw that the road had moments ago intersected the River Coquet, Northumberland’s venerated, historically milled yet remarkably clear-running waterway; a river flowing solely within the confines of the county. So strange, how a foreign stimulant can trigger the most intimate feelings – and why is it that smells most often take us all the way back to childhood. A few miles on, arriving at last at Lucker Mill B&B for the night, not far from the Lindisfarne crossing, the scent transitioned to lavender, full and pervasive in the darkness, given off from the B&B garden. No doubt most people have a particular memory bound up in lavender, whether or not they are aware of it. My own followed me up the path and over the grass and to my Lucker shepherds’ hut, on which my host had kindly marked ‘Matt’ in chalk, so that it glowed. With morning already on the horizon, I left the door open so that the lavender might filter in, and in the shrinking hours, make clear to my blurry brain that this was a journey of scent as much of sight.
An island of defiant religiosity and ethereal light, the low-lying Lindisfarne (or ‘Holy Island’, as it is better known) brings many pilgrims to its shores each year. Founded by the Ionian monk St. Aidan in the seventh century, brutally raided by Vikings in the eighth, and resurrected by the eleventh with the raising of a Benedictine priory, it is considered one of the birthplaces of English Christianity and, in the Anglican and Roman Catholic mindset alike, a manifestation of spiritual endurance. In the mid-sixteenth century Henry VIII dissolved the priory and built a defensive fort on the island’s southern volcanic rise, yet Lindisfarne remained evermore a place of peace, prayer and monastic solitude; a place for reconnection and respite, and rekindling diminishing fires.
At low tide, twice a day, its two square miles rejoin the mainland via a mudflat roadway and a yet more precarious footpath (the three-mile ‘Pilgrims Way’), allowing some 700,000 devoted pilgrims and agnostic day-trippers to visit annually; a mere 150 live permanently on the island. There is a small village, two pubs, a lighthouse and a popular coffee roastery; a wildlife centre, multiple ruins and historic lime kilns, and a modern castle built at the beginning of the last century from the ruin of King Henry’s fort. Set curiously adrift in the windswept field below the castle, there is also a walled garden originally planted by the eminent Victorian gardener Gertrude Jekyll; a small jewel box of colourful perennials and herbs, designed to peak in the summer months when the castle’s proprietor would be in residence. To sit in the quiet of this little oasis in high summer was the original intent of my own long-anticipated pilgrimage.
Surfacing by late morning, the shepherds’ hut door still open and the honeyed meadow beyond now bathed in sunlight, I left Lucker Mill for the Lindisfarne crossing, stopping for snacks on the way at a small farm shop. When I reached it, the causeway had not long been released from the sea, and little pools of water remained at its sides, perfuming the breeze with a salted dampness. Ahead, the low island lay disguised in the trickery of the sea-glinting brightness, and as I passed along it, the scent of rubbery seaweed and sulphate, warmed mud-sand and gull’s feathers, stirred the memory of long summers in Pembrokeshire; of a sandy ball thrown for the running family dog.
Oystercatchers were wading where the road met the island, and soon there were dunes rising to my left. This was the ‘Snook’, Lindisfarne’s narrow western peninsula, the long handle of the island’s pan-shaped profile. The northern half of the Snook is all sand and tidal water, and at the soonest opportunity I pulled over and went ranging over the dunes. An exceptionally biodiverse coastal habitat, I was aware there might be flowers, yet was surprised, still, at their number and diversity. The sand path led first beside a drift of dainty harebell, past blue bugloss, white campion and yellow bedstraw. Then through a thicket of willow herb and thistle to where pink marsh orchids hunkered in the marram grass. Where the sand opened up, there grew the many kinds of maritime herb – mounds of seepweed, sea rocket and spreading frosted orache. To crush the leaf of any one of these, and to hold it to your nose, is to release the scent of the sea itself.
Returning to the car, leaving the Snook and parking in the village, I joined a throng of visitors making their way along the coast walk towards the revered castle – owned and run by the National Trust since 1944 – but found myself distracted at intervals by the water. By cruising eider ducks and oystercatchers in low flight; mergansers diving and resurfacing, and a lone seal further out, floating, sculling, vanishing. I thought about Solva and Saint Davids, holiday walks over coastal heathland to reach beaches obscured below, and whether my fondness for seabirds actually began in childhood, and remains tangled in seaweed and sand turf.
The four walls of the garden had become visible in the field up ahead, and could be reached by a path splintering off to the left. Nonetheless, I took the longer route around the high mound of the castle, so as to delay my arrival a little longer, until I was suddenly at the foot of the low front wall and unlatching the wooden gate. Crossing the threshold of the little garden and entering its striking hush was like coming indoors from the bluster of a beach, the quiet momentarily dizzying. The central path of broken stone was steeped in the sweet mustiness of Russian sage and yellow marguerite; of feverfew and drying fennel. At its end was positioned a broad bench with a view looking out over the plantings to the castle beyond.
A hum of bees in the bottle-brushed Stachys byzantina, one of Jekyll’s signature ground-cover perennials. Planted densely and allowed to spread, the silver-green stachys wove among anemone and iris, and between obelisks of tumbling sweet peas and roses. And in the fragrance of these bright, colour-clashing things, emboldened by the blue sky, I sat in the heart of the little garden, eyes closed, breathing everything in. I recalled long lost roses from long ago gardens and felt the restlessness leave my body.
Words by Matt Collins.
Photography by Sophie Davidson.
Matt and Sophie stayed at Lucker Mill House B&B and Shepherds Huts.
Find more information at Visit Northumberland.
Add a comment