England Guide
The Northeast
Holy Island
Once known as Lindisfarne, Holy Island was an outpost of early Christianity. A tiny island of bare sandy flats measuring just one by one and a half miles, it's connected – at low tide – to the mainland by a three-mile causeway, but remains cut off for about five hours every day.
St Aidan of Iona founded a monastery here in 634, at the invitation of King Oswald of Northumbria. The monks quickly established a reputation for scholarship and artistry, exemplified by the Lindisfarne Gospels, the apotheosis of Celtic religious art, now kept in the British Library. The monastery had sixteen bishops in all, the most celebrated being the reluctant St Cuthbert, who never settled here; within two years, he was back in his hermit's cell on the Farne Islands, where he died in 687. His colleagues rowed the body back to Lindisfarne, which became a place of pilgrimage until 875, when the monks abandoned the island in fear of marauding Vikings, taking Cuthbert's remains with them.
The pinkish sandstone ruins of Lindisfarne Priory (April– Oct daily 9.30am–4/5pm; Nov– Jan Sat, Sun & Mon 10am–2pm; Feb & March daily 10am–4pm; £3.90; www.english-heritage.org.uk) are from the Benedictine foundation, while incised stones displayed in the museum are all that remains of the first monastery. Stuck on a rock half a mile away, Lindisfarne Castle (April– Oct daily except Mon, at least noon–3pm; £5.27; 
01289/389244, www.nationaltrust.org.uk) was built in the middle of the sixteenth century to protect the island's harbour from the Scots but in 1901 was turned into a holiday home to designs by Edwin Lutyens and gardens by Gertrude Jkyll.