Lindisfarne: The Holy Island of Anger

 Last Thursday we grabbed sack lunches and filed onto another coach, this time traveling two hours to the Holy Island of Lindisfarne to visit the Lindisfarne Priory. Built in 635 A.D., it’s known as the oldest Anglo-Saxon Northumbrian Christian monastery, and for its most famous bishop, St. Cuthbert. During a Viking raid in the late 10^th Century, monks moved the saint’s remains to Durham where they built the Durham Cathedral. Since Durham has been our home for the last three weeks, that’s pretty darn neat. Lindisfarne also had some exciting happenings. I’m afraid to put any premature value judgments on the trip, so I’ll tell you the story and then just let you decide for yourself how it went.

A few of the ancient stones at Lindisfarne Priory. 

 Anyway, I got on the coach and nabbed a seat in the row where the cool kids would’ve sat on a normal school bus, but there were still about five rows behind me. The bus was huge. I tried reading on the way there and I thought was working well until I woke up about 20 minutes shy of our destination. At certain times, Lindisfarne is truly an Island because the tide comes in and covers the road, stranding everyone bound by wheels for at least four hours (us until 5 p.m.). When we got there we grabbed our lunches – fruit, Kit-Kat, juice, and a ham and butter sandwich – and headed for the ruins off to the right. There were no signs leading to the Lindisfarne Priory Ruins, so we followed our eyes, as the stonework rose high above the local houses. The two guys in our group were leading the way, and they led us to an inn and open area where the ruins were just across a garden. It looked like an entrance until we got closer and realized that the wall was more like a three and a half foot drop instead of a little stone staircase.  However, we didn’t see any better entrance, so we decided to make do. Somebody suggested wearing dresses that day so we could have a group picture day, which naturally led to a bit of a problem finding the most ladylike way to fling ourselves over the rock wall. Most of us had made the leap with varying degrees of success when an angry lady ran over to us screaming all the while. She said we were breaking the rules of common courtesy by climbing over walls and insinuating we were all raised in something of a barbaric manner. Next she lashed out at us for climbing over an ancient rock wall, because obviously ancient stones are not for climbing. Then in all her infallible logic she demanded we retrace our path and clamber back over the delicate, ancient stones that got her so bent out of shape in the first place. It took a good 20 seconds of silently blinking at her tirade before Dr. Quinn started defending our actions, explaining that we simply took a wrong turn. A little man from the museum also scurried over at that point, so Dr. Quinn turned and repeated our logic. Meanwhile, the lady continued her half rant/half squawk at the rest of us, broken intermittently by Dr. Quinn’s shouted explanations to her during pauses in his discussion with the museum guy. Finally the guy was satisfied that we’d made an honest mistake. Either that or he realized the impossibility of forcing about a dozen young women in knee-length dresses to climb a wall more than half their heights. Perhaps he just realized the liability in the scenario, since he said his insurance policy took a strict anti-rock-wall-hopping stance. However, even after he left, the badgery hotel worker (who had absolutely zero affiliation with the ruins, mind you) renewed her verbal attack. I didn’t move during the showdown, both trusting a now-feisty Dr. Quinn to work it out and doubting my ability to gracefully ascend the wall without giving the rest of the group a first-class show. Because of our apparent heathen-like disregard for common courtesy, the lady maintained we should assault the ancient rock wall and retrace our steps for a proper entrance, even after Dr. Quinn explained we lost our way but had it okayed. Eventually, with a final acerbic “sorry,” our professor turned to us and told us to go look at ruins. The ruins were in worse shape than those in Rievaulx, but we looked extra hard at them after suffering through that verbal onslaught. Dr. Quinn occasionally took breaks from staring at the ground and sidestepping a further offence on ancient ruins to point out little historical bits of information that we missed while replaying his fight from memory. I think we all felt a little better when we left the place and headed to eat our lunch along the sea.

Along the way to our lunch break I stopped to look at a harbor that was filled with boats and tiny ships.  There was also a dad with his little son and a darling shaggy dog all playing on the shoreline.  I turned to my friend and said something along the lines of, “That’s the cutest dog ever; I just want to steal it!”

It takes mad skills (that I don't have)
to build towers like this.

Almost immediately, a family standing nearby starting whistling and calling, “Judy, come! Come ‘ere girl!” They were looking at the cute dog that I nonliterally threatened to steal. Whoops. A little later on we went to another part of the beach and were treated to stone stacking displays all along the coastline. I thought they had a calming effect, a bit like a Zen garden. Another girl in our group called them dream stones, explaining that if you could balance your stone on top of the pile your dream would come true. Four of us tried to build a stone tower, which got four stones high before toppling. Then we wised up and took pictures with a pre-built tower so we could masquerade as being just as in tune with balance and nature as any yoga instructor. By 2:30 our group had exhausted the bulk of the activities offered on the Holy Island, so we wound up wandering through town and stopping at a coffee shop. There were a limited number of places to explore, which made me further appreciate not living on an island that floods every day. However, it was a cute town and a great way to spend a day as long as you manage to avoid wrathful hotel workers.