WHEN the parish church is dedicated in honour of St Cuthbert, and even the working men’s club (now sadly for sale) is “The Bede”, you know you are in the north-east. Indeed, Maggie and I are back in beloved Northumbria on a much needed holiday, sauntering around and revisiting all our favourite places, from Amble’s welcoming parish church to Warkworth’s Castle and Hermitage, and then out on a boat to see the seals and puffins that circle Coquet Island, one of the places where Cuthbert is said to have stayed.

We are very relaxed, have no agenda, and are, as I said, “sauntering”. But, of course, both the word “holiday” and the word “saunter” have their own tales to tell, and their own influence on us. A holiday was of course originally a “holy day”, a saint’s day, a time both for refreshment and pilgrimage and for communion with those whose light and lives illuminate ours. I have been writing some verse recently about the sheer variety and vivid particularity — even eccentricity — of the saints, compared with the monotonous banality of evil:

Through all the saints God’s glory shines
In myriad different lights
Refracted through each vivid life
Their times of peace, their times of strife
Their earthy incarnated faith
Particular and intimate
The givenness of each fresh truth
In which each soul delights.

If you want the bathos of modernism in a nutshell, it is that we once had holidays for saints, and now we have them for banks.

Likewise, the word “saunter”. I love the folk etymology that suggests that it comes from la sainte terre, and described the meandering thoughtful progress of folk on pilgrimage. Sadly, that’s not the real etymology, and it more likely comes from a Middle English word meaning to muse or reflect, and came to apply to the way you would walk while musing.

Both etymologies fit us well on these “holy days”. I’m on holiday from dutiful correspondence, but not from poetry, and, on most holidays, my muse saunters with me, and of course Northumberland is supremely a sainte terre, a holy land, blessed and travelled over, perhaps even sauntered through, by Aidan and Cuthbert, Oswald and Bede.

Each time we return, we find something new, but I take greatest pleasure in revisiting the places we already know. I find it deeply reassuring that they are all still there: the smoke-house in Craster, full of their famous kippers; the ruins of Dunstanburgh Castle, looking as ever like sinister teeth jutting up from a broken jaw of the landscape; the lovely little square of fishermen’s cottages at Low Newton, where the Ship Inn still brews its own beer and the sparrows chirp and squabble over stray crumbs of stottie.

I like to think of it all going on in my absence, undistracted by, and unconcerned with, the myriad things that are distracting and concerning me. I think of these places as somehow keeping their peace for me — or, perhaps, even keeping my peace for me, waiting for my return.