The public lavatories on the Holy Island of Lindisfarne are fitted with floor-to-ceiling turnstiles. In the summer tourist season, when the vast car park on the outskirts of the island's only village is overflowing, the mechanisms revolve so rapidly they could easily be harnessed as an alternative energy source to heat and light the homes of Lindisfarne's 160 full-time residents.
Half a million people flock across the three-mile long causeway from mainland Northumberland each year and since Holy Island covers just 1,350 acres, they are not easily absorbed. As with any popular tourist site, it pays to pick your time to visit.
Saint Aidan, the Irishman who might be credited with inadvertently starting the rush, arrived in Northumberland in AD635. He chose Lindisfarne as the seat of his new bishopric largely because it reminded him of the Hebridean island of Iona.
Come here in the summer - when St Aidan's winery is besieged by coach parties eager to test the reputed aphrodisiacal powers of Lindisfarne mead and the driveway to the small castle on Beblow Crag is doing a passable imitation of Oxford Street - and it's hard to grasp what might have led the Columban monk to such a whimsical conclusion.
Iona, after all, is the personification of Celtic asceticism, while Holy Island is, well, a place where the public lavatories are entered as if they were a football stadium.
Arrive in autumn, winter or early spring, however, when the climate deters all but the doughtiest, and the impression Lindisfarne creates is altogether different. Come early in the morning when there's frost, or snow, or just a tear-jerking wind whipping in off the North Sea and it's easy to see why the rigorously spiritual Aidan might have been reminded of his former home.
Just after Christmas, I crossed to Lindisfarne on the twice-daily bus service from Berwick-on-Tweed, 10 miles up the coast. It was one of those days when the temperature rarely breaks freezing point and exposed skin tightens until your face feels like it's shrink-wrapped.
The biscuit-coloured grass along the water's edge was tinged pewter by the frost, and powdered snow swirled out from around the wheels of the bus like a theatrical mist. A skein of Canada geese wheeled above the lough and flocks of speckled drumlins skittered in and out of the sea like paddling children.
The causeway crosses the water from Beal and sweeps along the western shore of the island. The sea closes it for around 10 hours a day. Tide tables and warning notices are posted at regular intervals along both approaches. Yet, despite all such efforts, last year 80 visitors still managed to get into trouble on the crossing. Some found shelter in the refuge hut, a clapboard shed on stilts that hovers just above the high-water mark, others needed assistance. The rescue services were called out 15 times in all. Now there is talk of CCTV cameras.
The bus from Berwick stops in the village marketplace, next to the mead factory and opposite the ruined priory. In the backyard of a low stone cottage the crab pots are neatly stacked. Northumbrian crab is good, and if you're lucky on Lindisfarne you can find fishermen selling sandwiches filled with it at the front doors of their houses.
After his arrival, Aidan quickly established Lindisfarne as the Christian capital of the north, overseeing a region that extended from Edinburgh to the Humber. A monastery was built in the Irish style: hewn oak roofed with a thatch of reeds and surrounded by a defensive wall. Nothing of that structure survives; the ruins, including the impressive rainbow arch, date from Norman times when the austerity of the Columban monks had been superseded by the greater opulence of the Benedictine order. An arch way in nearby church of St Mary is the only bit of Saxon architecture that survives on the island.
St Mary's also has the "petting stone" or "louping stool", a large boulder over which brides leap either for good luck or fertility depending on the sensibilities of the chronicler. The wedding procession on Lindisfarne is also traditionally accompanied by the mass discharging of shotguns. At one time live rounds were fired, but that practice was discontinued a decade or so ago after a nearby hotelier took exception to having his windows shattered.
Aidan may have chosen Lindisfarne largely for ascetic reasons, but there were political considerations behind his choice, too. You can see the main one from the Heugh, a grassy bank that rises to the south of St Mary's. Across the waters of Budle Bay stands Bamburgh, once the home of Oswald, first Christian monarch of the Saxon kingdom of Northum bria. The castle that now looms from the clifftop there, dwarfing the nearby village, is a 15th-century creation, but it was built on the site of Oswald's original palace.
It was Oswald who invited Aidan to Northumberland in the first place, soon after the warrior king had battered the pagan armies of Cadwallader, close by Hadrian's Wall at Heavenfield. Oswald himself was later sanctified after splinters from the pole on which his head was impaled miraculously cured those who drank from water in which they had fallen.
Oswald was by all accounts a kind and generous man, but his main role in the newly-established monastery was as military protector. At Bamburgh he was ideally placed to keep an eye on things.
When Aidan died, Cuthbert, the shepherd-saint from nearby Glendale, became Bishop of Lindisfarne. The nature-loving Northumbrian added further to the importance of the island. Five future saints were educated here. When Cuthbert died prematurely, weakened by his adherence to a punishing regime of fasting and self-flagellation, on nearby Great Farne Island in AD687, his body was brought back to the monastery and buried alongside, it is said, the skull of his former protector Oswald. It was in commemoration of Cuthbert that his successor Eadfrith created the monastery's most lasting physical work, the Lindisfarne gospels.
A century later the island's position, once a source of security, became its main point of weakness. In AD793, according to the Anglo-Saxon Chronicles, "terrible portents" of sheet lighting, whirlwinds and "fiery dragons flying across the sky" were followed by "the harrying of heathen men" who "miserably destroyed God's church in Lindisfarne through rapine and slaughter". The Vikings had arrived.
On Lindisfarne's north shore, the island still looks much as the Norsemen must have seen it. A three-mile strip of pale sand is flanked by blond, tussocky hillocks and the only sounds are the skeletal rattling of the wind-dried grasses, the rush of the sea and the keening of the lapwings.
Along the beach you can still sometimes find St Cuthbert's beads - the fossilised joints of the stone-lily that were once used for rosaries. Or you may come across a basking grey seal; the gelatinous remains of Britain's longest animal, the northern octopus; or a bobbing flock of the eider ducks that were the saint's favourite bird. Look across at the mainland and the contrast is startling. Northumberland is vividly green, Lindisfarne bleached as driftwood. No wonder self-denying Aidan and his followers picked it.
After the first Danish attack, the Columban monks hung on for another 100 years. But then, fearing further raids, they fled taking the gospels and the remains of St Cuthbert with them. Cuthbert's body was returned briefly to Lindisfarne for safekeeping during William the Conqueror's brutal suppression of the north, before finding its final resting place in Durham cathedral.
The course of the gospels was altogether more wayward. For several centuries they disappeared altogether, turning up in 1623 in the possession of a clerk of the House of Commons. They were later handed over to the British Museum by Sir Robert Cotton, and are now on display in the British Library.
And, for the first time in more than 1,000 years, the gospels have returned to Holy Island - albeit in a virtual sense. The new Lindisfarne Heritage Centre in Marygate has an interactive computer display with more than 20 pages. In this case, the phrase "illuminated manuscript" is apt in more ways than one. Such is the vividness of the colours in the gospels that the illustrations really do appear to glow with light. The real gospels are actually in Newcastle at the moment, where they are on loan to the Laing Art Gallery until tomorrow. They have survived their circuitous journey remarkably well, particularly since they were reputedly once lost in the Irish Sea and not recovered for four days.
Monks eventually returned to Lindisfarne, which they re-named Holy Island, but its importance had been lost. The monastery was dissolved around 1538 and the island devoted itself to more secular matters: fishing, farming and as a base for the English fleets that lay in wait for Spanish ships bound for Leith.
The castle that perches 100ft up on the conical rock to the east of the village owes its existence to the Anglo-Scottish conflict, though the modern building which, with its curved walls and funnel-like turrets, has the appearance of a grand ocean liner, owes more to the vision of Sir Edwin Lutyens who re-designed it in 1903 than to Tudor military architects.
The tiny castle is so heavily visited these days it seems in danger of subsiding under the weight of numbers. Nowa days it is open for just four-and-a-half hours daily, while the little, walled Gertrude Jekyll-designed garden is open just one day a week.
When sinking ships went out of fashion, the islanders took to aiding them. Lindisfarne and the Farnes (from which the lighthouse keeper's daughter, Grace Darling, performed the deeds that made her a Victorian heroine) are surrounded by sand bars and savage rocks.
Once two lifeboats operated from the island; a memorial opposite the entrance to the priory records the crews they helped to rescue. Sailors from Stockholm, Archangel, Timmernabben, Rafsoe, Stavanger, Nantes and Scheveningen once swelled the local population as visitors who arrive by car and coach do today. Though not in quite such numbers, thankfully.
The practicals
The Lindisfarne gospels are on loan to the Laing Art Gallery, New Bridge Street, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE1 8AG (0191-232 7734) until tomorrow. The gallery is open today from 10am-5pm (because queues are approx 60-90 minutes long, last entrance will be at 3.30pm); and Sunday from 2pm-5pm. Entrance is free. After tomorrow, the gospels will return to the British Library in London where they will go back on display on February 1. The interactive computer exhibit, with more than 20 copied pages, is at Lindisfarne Heritage Centre in Marygate (01289 389004), open every day throughout the year from 10am-4pm, entrance £2 for adults, children free. The causeway to Lindisfarne is closed at high tide. Safe crossing times can be obtained from the Northumbria Tourist Board (0191-375 3009/3016) or by visiting www.northumberland.gov.uk
Accommodation
Lindisfarne Hotel (01289 389273) from £30 per person per night. The Manor House Hotel (01289 389207), doubles from £59 per night. The Ship Inn (01289 389207) from £22pp per night. A comprehensive list of accommodation on Lindisfarne, including bed and breakfasts and self-catering, is available from the Northumbria Tourist Board or by visiting www.lindisfarne.org.uk.
