My annual ‘pilgrimage’ to this ‘Holy Island’ was enjoyable as ever, but artistically unremarkable except that we were extremely lucky with both weather and light and captured some good photographs.

Dawn over Lindisfarne castle, 5 a.m. , 2 October:

On the 7-mile walk around the island on the same day, we happened to reach the navigation marker at the north-east corner at a propitious moment in terms of light and shadow:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The castle was at last free of its scaffolding after a major renovation, so its idiosyncratic profile was once more restored to the landscape:

The clear light enables the much lower profiles of the top of the limekilns to its east and the Gertrude Jekyll walled garden to its north to be visible. And an hour later, the now low sun’s rays picked out the architectural details of the Romanesque west front of the Priory church:

 

We had begun the walk with curlews standing with dignified posture around the edges of the mud-flats crossed by the causeway to the mainland; we ended it with elegant seals, looking down on them from the watch-tower on the Heugh as they slid through the seas on a falling tide near St. Cuthbert’s island.