St Aidan’s church in Bamburgh stands to the west of the village. Through the chancel arch and immediately to its left is the shrine marking the place where it is said St Aidan died. Aidan is one of the Bamburgh saints mentioned in Gavin Wakefield’s new book. Coming out of the church and to the right is the elaborate tomb of Grace Darling. She was the young woman who, with her father, rescued passengers from the steamship Forfarshire when it ploughed into the Farnes. The museum opposite the church tells the story. Grace Darling is a second Bamburgh saint included. Grace is not usually thought of as a saint, but in including her, Wakefield makes an important point: that Grace and her family in their Longstone lighthouse home ‘were very devout Christians; William taught the children Bible stories, read them sermons from books and led them in prayer’. Grace was a follower of Christ, a holy person in the sense that the New Testament speaks of Christians, flawed no doubt like the rest of us, but called by Christ to walk the way of the cross with him.
Grace Darling’s story is told in Day 2 of the book, St Aidan’s, on Day 1. On Day 2, he also tells the story of St Ebba. Ebba was the abbess of a community in Coldingham, which is north of Berwick; she gives her name to nearby St Abb’s Head. Ebba was a princess who became abbess of her monastery, a leadership which was, by all accounts, too much for her; indeed, reading between the lines, her community was known to be lax and undisciplined. Despite these difficulties, she was termed a saint, a woman of deep prayer.
This study of North East Saints follows Wakefield’s earlier book on the saints of Yorkshire. ‘Saints and Holy Places of Yorkshire’ (Sacristy Press 2020). In this one, he invites the reader to ‘accompany’ St Cuthbert on his journey from Holy Island to Durham. By car, he suggests, though it is possible to visit most of the places by public transport. Alternatively, he suggests the pilgrim take it one day at a time – as I did when visiting Bamburgh.
Each of the nine days he describes follows a similar pattern; after a brief introduction, he tells the stories of two or three saints, famous ones from the past like Aidan, Cuthbert and Bede and modern ones like Grace, drawing a spiritual lesson from each. He then talks of the places associated with them, adds a prayer on a particular theme and concludes with practicalities: references to books, websites, routes, etc.
Day 3 takes the pilgrim into the Tyne Valley and Hadrian’s Wall. Those of us who ministered in the Tyne Valley were aware of our debt to the Saxons for building their churches out of the store of dressed stones so conveniently held in the wall. Wakefield mentions Hexham and Corbridge as examples; there are a number more. In mentioning them, he reflects on the significance of building in stone rather than in wood (pages 51–52). On Day 4 in Newcastle, he introduces us to John Wesley’s ministry – I have banked at Barclays in Northumberland Street for years but had never, until reading this book, noticed the plaque above the building which refers to the bank as the site of his Newcastle headquarters. On Day 5, he reflects on the Sunderland ministry of Alexander Boddy and his wife Mary. The 1907 plaque that is on what used to be the church hall records the moment when the fire of the Holy Spirit descended and ‘burnt up the debt’. Boddy was our country’s pioneer of the Pentecostal movement. On Day 7, he refers to the 18th-century ministry of a Weardale schoolmistress, Jane Salkeld, and to Wesley’s tribute: she was ‘the chief instrument of God’ in Weardale, a ‘pattern to all that believe’. (p. 111).
This is a gift of the book, these introductions to a range of holy followers of Christ. Further, the book broadens the concept of pilgrimage. It not only directs us to the many paths there already are but also encourages us to devise our own. Pilgrimage is the kind of spiritual exercise that opens up so many valuable ways of listening and responding to the love of God.
