We flew into Edinburgh, arriving on Saturday, April 13. We had originally planned to take a train to Melrose, the town where St. Cuthbert’s Way starts, spend the night there on Saturday and begin walking on Palm Sunday. It turns out that there is an annual rugby tournament in Melrose every April, and there were no vacancies available that Saturday. So instead we stayed the night in Edinburgh. Being in Edinburgh on Palm Sunday allowed me to visit The Parish Church of St. Cuthbert which was a short walk from our hotel. The website (https://stcuthberts-edinburgh.uk/) explains: “St Cuthbert’s Parish Church is believed to be the oldest Christian site in Edinburgh. We have been nurturing hearts for God since St Cuthbert founded the first church on this site around 670AD.” Attending a service there seemed like a fitting start for the week. I opted for a communion service instead of the full Palm Sunday service later in the morning. There were 10 people in attendance from various parts of the world, along with 2 priests. It was a warm and personal service. We sang a traditional hymn, prayed a prayer of confession, joined in a responsive reading; it satisfied a lot of desires I have been experiencing for worship. I have been longing for a traditional style service like I remember from my childhood.
After a few hours exploring Edinburgh we caught the train to Melrose and saw Melrose Abbey where the walk begins. St. Cuthbert started his monastic life as a young man at Melrose Abbey, and later became the Prior there. We enjoyed a delicious dinner at Burt’s Hotel in town, spent the night at a nice bed and breakfast, and started off at 9:15 or so from Melrose.
At breakfast our host gently broke it to us that the route we would be walking had never actually been walked by St. Cuthbert (this was not news to us, I believe it represents his life journey from Melrose to Lindisfarne rather than any actual journey he took). His reason seemed to be that Cuthbert would never have been so stupid as to take a route over the Eildon Hills, although he didn’t put it quite that way. “It makes a nice story, though.”, he said. We spent the first hour and a half or two hours of our walk ascending the Eildon hills and understood his point.
At right around noon we stopped for lunch in Newtown St. Boswells having only completed about a third of our walk. A cab had been pre-arranged to pick us up at the end of the days walk to bring us to our B&B, and we realized we were not going to be on time to meet it. We called and postponed the cab. We called two more times in the afternoon as we realized it was taking us much longer than we had anticipated to walk the day’s mileage. In case anyone is not wondering I was the limiting factor for our pace. I’m slow. S-L-O-W. Going uphill I’m even more slow. And we were going uphill ALL THE TIME. That’s how it felt, anyway. As the afternoon wore on the sun went behind clouds and it got cooler and the light got dimmer (although the sun sets much later there than in New England at this time of year). We finally reached the visitor center at 7:15. We had originally planned to head out for dinner once we arrived at the B&B, but neither of us was hungry. Just cold. We took hot showers and went to bed, hoping to be ready to start off early again the next day.
https://www.undiscoveredscotland.co.uk/melrose/melroseabbey/index.html
The Path Whereon I Go 