regular readers will know that just after the Yorkshire Dales, Northumbria comes right up there on my list of ‘most beautiful places in the world’. So I was heartened by this campaign to return to the Northumbrian nation their most precious relic. By way of t’Grauniad. They don’t quite say ‘we recognise no king but a Percy king’, but they obviously mean it.
Forty pilgrims braved the bitterly cold weather to walk eight miles in the footsteps of the monks who carried the body of St Cuthbert from Chester-le-Street to Durham.
The march was organised by the Northumbrian Association as part of its campaign to have the Lindisfarne Gospels returned to the region from the British Library in London. The manuscripts were created by Eadfrith the monk on Lindisfarne and dedicated to St Cuthbert, Northumberland’s patron saint, who died in 687.
They were intended to stay in Durham cathedral with St Cuthbert’s body, but were taken by Henry VIII in 1537 and have been kept at the British Library since the nineteenth century.
Northumbrian Association treasurer John Danby told the Newcastle Journal: “The Gospels were written in the north-east and were meant to stay here. They’re part of our history and heritage.
“The British Library has claimed we wouldn’t be able to look after the Gospels and have said scholars wouldn’t be willing to travel to the north-east to visit them,” he said. “But as one of our members pointed out, we invented the railway for them to travel here.”
The gospels were seen by 180,000 people while they were on loan in the north-east in 2001.
“But as one of our members pointed out, we invented the railway for them to travel here.”
Just brilliant!! As a Sussex boy I cannot show genuine empathy with the North, but it does get a rough ride from the London centric media. Nice to see some people sticking it to the southerners!
Comment by Vindico — July 30, 2007 @ 2:01 pm