Twinn
The Island within an Island
The Island within an Island, within an Island . . . .
Exceptional Lindisfarne
It was a weird and wobbly weekend. Within the space of a few days, England had left its soul in the ballot box of destiny, and its heart on some far-flung French football field. Suddenly, temple pillars were tumbling, and deep down we knew that our world would never be quite the same again - at least not in this lifetime. Like the silent spot at the eye of the whirlwind, maybe it was a perfect time to be at one with one of England’s oldest and most spiritual of places.
At high water, St Cuthbert’s Islet lies off the south west tip of Lindisfarne (which itself translates as Island-Island, or the Island within the Island). Lindisfarne Priory, on Holy Island, is also detached from the UK mainland for much of the day - and, of course, even that Kingdom is just another island off the coast of Europe - at least when seen from space. And the planet itself . . .
Cuthbert, a 7th Century Celtic Christian monk, eschewed the fame that followed him in subsequent times to pursue a hermit’s life on a featureless offshore promontory. There, he gained much enlightenment through personal peace in a simple stone shelter - the foundations of which remain to this day. In the end, his growing reputation as a man of great ideas and insight rendered even this distant sanctuary too metropolitan - and he ended his cycle on the even more remote and storm-battered rocks of Inner Farne (now a nature reserve), where a more substantial chapel has been built in his remembrance.
St Cuthbert’s Isle on Lindisfarne has a strong and individual sense of place. Part of this is decidedly physical, due not only to the extremities of the climate, but also to the ambience of the underlying seam of extruded basalt. You don’t have to be a crack dowser to feel the difference between Cuthbert’s bed-rock and the energy of the rounded stones on the nearby beach.
With guillemots and puffins in the air, and serenaded by the eerie sound of several colonies of Atlantic Grey seals, this is a very particular place to be - especially when the bulk of the visitors have returned to their own realities.
Three energy currents cross the island, including a particularly strong long-distance female line discovered and described by earth energy specialists Caroline Hoare and Gary Biltcliffe. Some dowsers have said that energy lines begin here, adding yet another level of mystery to the site. I feel they may have interpreted differently the lines that are not ‘energy’ or ‘force’, which do indeed start at the chapel on the mound, but which I find to be those of ‘consciousness’. There are at least four of them, dating from the Bronze Age or earlier, each aligned to a local or a distant hill, to an island or to a notch on the horizon. While these certainly emanate from the isle, they predate Cuthbert by several generations.
One feature of the chapel site, unique in my experience, is the presence of a distinctly ‘Celtic’ manifestation. Again, it predates the Christian era by a considerable period, but could easily have been represented in the floor of a later building. It consists of eight recursive circular icons linked in a chain. Nested inside of this is a second set of eight such icons. As the space closes down towards the centre, there are at least two more rings of icons, which are too intricate to be investigated using rods. Whether such a pattern is a part of a seven-fold sequence, or whether it shrinks towards infinity, would require a much more detailed examination.
My dowsing indicated that the central point of this three-dimensional manifestation rises to a great height and drops to a great depth. The overall movement of ‘energy’ is upward from the ground, perhaps giving rise to the concept that energy currents emanate from here.
All of the latticework dowses as being quite natural, although it has been moulded by its unavoidable interaction with our Celtic ancestors, with that of the Christian monks and, of course, with ourselves.
Of the array of sites on Holy Island, the comparatively modern parish Church of St Mary hosts perhaps the most soothing and agreeable ambience.
The other feature worthy of note in a brief summary of dowsing on Lindisfarne lies in the nave of the now-ruined priory. Wooden, and later stone, structures stood on this site from the 7th to the 16th centuries, yet human occupation and devotion predates these buildings by many millennia. Gary and Caroline had already surmised that prior to the Christian era, megaliths would have been situated here - and had identified certain stones that might have come from such a structure. My own dowsing gave this idea a little added impetus.
In a number of chambered tombs and long barrows across the Celtic lands, my wife Ros and I have found energetic examples of the infinity symbol, originally found by the dowser Hamish Miller in the latter part of the last century. Our addition to his revelation is that some of these lemniscates (as they are known) rotate - rather like an etheric propeller. Indeed, there can sometimes be two such shapes nested within one another and rotating in different directions.
I had never found such an earth energy feature outside of a megalithic enclosed space, but maybe I had just not asked the right question at the right time. In Lindisfarne Priory, there is a strong, definitive rotating double-propeller, which could indicate that St Aiden’s original wooden church in this field was in fact built over a pre-Christian chambered tomb - the remaining elements of which would have been very useful, and very handy, building materials for the subsequent priory.
Many thanks to Bill Holding and The Ridings Dowsers for inviting us to this special place - and to Gary Biltcliffe and Caroline Hoare for sharing their hard-won experience and specialist knowledge.
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Nigel Twinn June 2016
