walking on the same ground

Returning to Birkenhead after three weeks in Papay, catching up on the ordinary opportunity to read the Observer in hard copy, sitting in a coffee shop ... I found my copy of the writings of Pelagius on the bedroom floor which is to say, where it was when I left, and started to read his Letter to Demetrias, who was fourteen and wanted to dedicate herself to the religious life as a virgin ... it hardly matters what the topic was except that I have this recurring ... well, hardly a problem, but I find that my imagination cannot quite cope with the idea that some ancient Briton can write elegant Latin prose (maybe he couldn't though, maybe he needed a little help from his friend) about the virtues of the religious life with psychological insight and shrewdness. The very idea of a complicated sentence structure with qualifications and sub-clauses and so forth ... there is something ridiculous about what I am trying to say ... unlike Jerome and Augustine, say, who I knew first from their writings. In this case what I know first is that someone was brought up on this soil, perhaps walked across these fields or in this woodland ... and I can't quite connect that with the life of the mind. It's a failure of my background imaginative assumptions, the background picture. By the way, they all say that Augustine was incomparably cleverer than Pelagius ... and yet all my sympathies are with Pelagius: perhaps because I'm rather charmed by the idea of someone being cleverer and wrong in a culture which values cleverness so much. I try to distinguish between being clever and being intelligent, perhaps because I am not that clever myself.

A similar thing with Orkney, with St Boniface Kirk, for instance, a monastic settlement, conceivably led by an Abbot promoted to Melrose in the 1170's (though Eynhallow seems the official candidate for Abbot Laurence) ... but, again, walking these fields, standing on this shore ... Cistercians, after the earlier Columban monks finding their little deserts in the midst of swirling seas: with the same toughness of mind one finds in Pelagius ...

Daniel took Jonardon and me across to the Papey Holm in his inflatable on Thursday afternoon, but not for long since the wind was rising, a powerful, uninhabited place, and a glimpse into the chambered cairn: