After a brilliant breakfast, we had a prearranged meeting with Geordie. He was ferrying us to the village on Holy Island. The timing of our day’s visit was determined by the tides. The causeway was only passable until about 11a.m. and would then be submerged until 4 in the afternoon.
Holy Island, on the map, looks like an ugly, heavy-headed fish looking east. The causeway crosses to the tail, The Snook, and from here the road travels east across the wispy waist to the bulbous head. On the southern end of this head lies the mouth – the harbour, and the village occupies the lower jaw. Geordie pointed out places of interest and the best places to eat, dropping us off near the post office.
We walked to the south-east corner of holy island, the forehead if you like, where the castle sits on the highest point on the island. It was built by Henry VIII to defend his realm from those aggressive Scots, but today it is predominantly modern, having been given a makeover by Sir Edwin Lutyens at the beginning of the 20th century. Beneath the castle, there is an impressive maze of lime kilns, and a hundred yards away from the ramparts sits a rather incongruous walled garden, well-tended and thriving.
Walking back to the village around the harbour, I felt that the wonder of Lindisfarne had a great deal to do with the isolation. How do the folk who live here adapt to such exposure to the elements? I suppose like the plants in the walled garden, they are a self-selected group whose main characteristic is hardiness. Unlikely to blow over in a storm.
We meandered around the ruins of Lindisfarne Priory and the island’s parish church, St. Mary’s. We lunched on a crab sandwich at the post office, a busy eatery besides its other, more traditional functions.
We had chosen a day to visit Holy Island when it would have been very difficult to walk safely over the sands which separate it from the mainland. To walk out to Holy Island in the morning, we would have had to have started out before 6a.m. To walk back, we would have to wait until about 6p.m. and would be reaching the mainland too close to dusk to be truly safe. But we resolved to walk back over the island to reach the causeway when it would be passable to traffic, sometime after 4p.m.
We followed the road north out of the compact village to the point where you can see the straight line of posts marking out the line of the low tide walk across sand and mud. Here we took a footpath to the right across sand and marram grass. Most of Holy Island appears to be dunes. We headed north-west to get to the northern shore of the island. This was a magical place – vast swathes of sand with only one or two humans dotted upon it. We followed the shoreline of dunes until our GPS told us that we had reached the Snook. And once again we walked across dunes, passing Snook Tower on our right and regaining the road just before it reached the causeway. We had timed it to perfection; cars were beginning to cross the newly uncovered tarmac. There was no pavement, so we squelched through the adjacent mud and sand. Geordie picked us up on the mainland side.
We had passed a curious hut raised on stilts up to which climbed steps. I asked Geordie what it was for. And apparently it is a safe haven for those who have mistimed driving across the causeway and their car cuts out as the water rises. Imagine being cooped up in a space no bigger than four feet square for 5-6 hours watching your vehicle become submerged, its sodden state beyond repair; contemplating the fact that your own foolhardiness will be unlikely to be covered by insurance.
We learned a fair bit about Geordie as he ferried us about: his medical conditions, his family tree, his work at the White Swan. He was much more than a gofer – marketing and networking obviously came under his remit. And he was a marvellous spinner of yarns!