The Pilgrim's Way to Lindisfarne: A land between ...

Some years ago, with my husband and our son, I walked the St Cuthbert's Way from Melrose in the Scottish borders to Lindisfarne, in Northumberland.  It was a wonderful walk of great variety; woodland paths, upland moors, riverbanks, farmland.  But on the last day we walked through an almost other-worldly landscape. 

Having walked through the morning, we had time to sit on the shore, eating our sandwiches, and looking out across the sea to Lindisfarne.  Almost imperceptibly land gradually appeared before us as we ate, and spindly wooden poles became waymarkers beckoning us onward from our resting place,  revealing our route across this land between lands. 

Initially the sands, although wet, were not very different to walking on our beach at home at low tide, and it was tempting to keep on our trusty boots.  But it had been suggested that barefoot was really the only way to make this pilgrimage, so boots, and socks, were peeled off, and tied on to our packs.

The Pilgrim's Way, across the intertidal mudflats, has been walked for centuries, and until the construction of the road to the island in 1954, was the only safe and clearly indicated route. Today we were lone pilgrims.  Cars passengers seemed intrigued by three heavy-laden, barefoot walkers leaving the safety of the road to enter a land not inhabited by people, and as we left the road behind us we looked back with intrigue at cars racing by this strange liminal space. 

Before long, roads and cars were left behind.  It wasn't a windy day, yet the wind seemed to be howling.  But the sound wasn't quite right for wind - rather it haunted us ... the ultimate sound of despair, rising and falling, impossibly loud, yet far from us and our safety-line of sticks. Even as we stopped and listened, it was hard to identify the direction or the distance from us.  In any other place, one would have felt compelled to respond to this distant cry of loss and grief, but here, to attempt to go towards the sound would have been foolish and futile.  Instead, it formed a soundtrack to our passage: wet mud squelching between our toes; sun and wind on our faces; seals singing songs of despair in our ears that resonated deep in our souls. 

Mythical stories live here, in this intertidal, other-worldly, space. Nothing is what it seems: the land literally moves beneath us as we tread; sounds of the air and the animals for whom this is home, play eerily on any sense of security and familiarity; the distant island in front and mainland behind, reach a peculiar immovability, neither getting closer nor further away.  Anything might happen in this place. 

Along the route there are two refuges.  I wanted to climb and see what it was like up there, so stepped onto the seaweed and mollusc encrusted ladder to make my way up.  It felt like a climb to the heavens, the platform high above the sands in order to be also above the highest seas that might engulf this place. I reached the top, pulling myself up, and once up there could not see Simon and Findlay below. I felt scared, vulnerable, alone.  The world I normally inhabited seemed far away.

Strangely, for them too, there was a feeling of my having left them.  As time passed, they joked that should one of them climb to check I was OK there would be no sign of me within the four walls of 'safety'. The 'Snook' (the name of part of the distant land that the road struck first) had got me, they decided.  "It was the Snook!" they told me after I'd re-joined them on the mud flats. And so began our storytelling, of the unexpected, the other worldly, imagined events, accompanying us (with tears, and terror, and great hilarity) as we walked on.

We arrived on more familiar ground, on the island of Lindisfarne, before the tide had turned but with the sun setting, and stood looking back over our passage.  The seals had fallen silent (or maybe were calling to some other voyager), and the tarmac beneath our shod feet seemed harsh, rigid, and impenetrable. Our connection with this manicured land was so much less immediate, so much more forced.  And the felt connection with mystery too, seemed like a distant dream, that grew more distant as I later washed the stinking mud from between my toes.