22 THE INSULATION OF ST. MICHAEL'S MOUNT. 
member the following description of Lindisfarne, or Holy Island, 
on the coast of Northumberland :— 
‘‘ The tide now did its flood-mark gain, 
And girdled in the Saint’s domain : 
For, with the flow and ebb, its style 
Varies from continent to isle; 
Dry shod, o’er sands, twice every day, 
The pilgrims to the shrine find way ; 
Twice every day the waves efface 
Of staves and sandalled feet the trace. 
Canto II., Stanza 9. 
This description appears to have been as appropriate in the 
seventh Century asin the present day, for Bede states that in 
635 A.D. the elders of the Scots sent Aidan to be bishop of 
Northumberland, at the request of the pious King Oswald; and 
that ‘“‘the King appointed him his episcopal see in the isle of 
Lindisfarne, as he desired. Which place, as the tide flows and 
ebbs twice a day, is enclosed by the waves of the sea like an 
island; and again, twice in the day, when the shore is left dry, 
becomes contiguous to the land.* 
When it is remembered that Bede was born in the year 673, 
on the coast between the Tyne and Wear, almost within sight of 
Lindisfarne ; that he spent his entire life from seven years of age 
in the abbeys of Wearmouth, and of Jarrow on the Tyne, where 
he died in 735; that he was an ecclesiastic and a writer of eccle- 
siastical history ; and that all the churches from the Tyne to the 
Tweed, and many of those from the Tyne to the Humber, had 
their beginning from the Monastery in Holy Island, it cannot be 
doubted that he had every opportunity and motive to make him- 
self perfectly acquainted with the history and condition of a spot 
which he must have held sacred. We may safely conclude, then, 
that there has been no change of relative level of sea and land on 
the coast of Northumberland during the last thirteen centuries ; 
and that Bede was not aware of any tradition of a different con- 
dition of the Holy Island. 
II. Though it is not possible in many cases to ascertain the 
thickness of the materials deposited on the ancient forests so fre- 
quently mentioned, thanks to the careful observations which have 
* Heclesiastical History. B. iii, Ch. 3. (Bohn’s Hd.) 
