Today we bring distant mountains together. Kilimanjaro, Stromboli, Fuji, Shasta and Uluru. We’ll watch them jostle, nuzzle and tumble into each other; a happy, footloose swarm that will soon be washed away, like all mountains must be; worn away by the tides and disappearing back into the sea.
The highest peaks rise and fall. Our micro-summits speed up the course of nature and encourage a few improbable geological encounters. It’s just play. So let’s pretend: let’s imagine that these molehills are mighty things; come to this shore as friends. Northumberland’s coast needs all of those it can muster. It is threatened by mining, erosion, sea-level rise, creeping suburbanisation, and the plastics that stew in the seas. We like to say it is our favourite place but if anywhere needs help from afar it is here. So we summon Kilimanjaro, Stromboli, Fuji, Shasta and Uluru as old, dimly-recognised colleagues; magicked here to lend us their weight and their wisdom. They are, after all, very special mountains: Uluru, which is also known as Ayer’s Rock, is a sacred mountain, which glows red at dawn and dusk. The others are all volcanoes. Kilimanjaro’s snow-white cap rises in Tanzania, ever-smoking Stromboli lies off the north coast of Sicily, Mount Fuji’s perfect cone frames the southern suburbs of Tokyo, and you can find brooding Mount Shasta in the highlands of California. These are not dead places, mere piles of rock, but churning, living forces; raw and angry, full of both destructive and creative energies.
Can all that power be contained in a bucket of sand? Imagine it. Perhaps so. And can this beach be a place of miracles? I guess we have to keep trying. Faith is unlikely but possible. The Venerable Bede tells us that Saint Cuthbert, who died a hermit on Inner Farne 1,332 years ago, would return to this coast after spending weeks preaching “far away on steep and rugged mountainsides, which others dreaded to visit”. Bede, a reliable Jarrow man, explains that Cuthbert would “tarry in the mountains” – our border hills - not because they were easy but because they were hard: they were difficult to get to, cut off and dangerous.
Perhaps our sandcastles – bringing the mountain down to the beach – pay a kind of homage to Cuthbert. He was, after all, a man of many miracles. In monasteries at Coldingham and Lindisfarne, Cuthbert appeared to disappear every night. The other monks couldn’t understand where he went. One night a particularly curious novice crept after him and this, says Bede, is what he saw:
Spying in the dark, this monk watched astonished as Cuthbert walked neck deep into the sea and spent the dark hours of the night “watching and singing praises to the sound of the waves.” When daylight came sea otters came out of the water with him and dried his feet with their fur whilst he blessed them.
Small miracles are the best miracles. One can almost believe in them. Maybe no otters will come and dry our feet but we can bring some of the world’s most distant and beautiful mountains to this beach. Here, briefly, Kilimanjaro, Stromboli, Fuji, Shasta and Uluru can circle round each other, collide and safely explode. Anything can happen; at least anything that is small and made of sand: it’s geography unleashed and, perhaps, it’s also a summoning of friends.
