An otherworldly place

Pilgrimage to isle of forebears brings peace and a sense of the saints

By Linda Radtke, June 18, 2007 [Episcopal News Service] There are truly sacred places on the earth. We can feel them, sense them. Some are private; some carry the accumulated weight of history. We can walk the ways of pilgrims through the ages and feel that sense of the community of saints of which we, too, are a part.

Such a place, for me, is Bardsey Island, two miles off the coast of North Wales. The Welsh call it Ynys Enlli, the Island in the Tide. It is wind-swept, two humps of gorse-covered green in a turbulent sea off Braich Y Pwll on the LLyn penninsula, a place of pilgrimage since medieval times, when three pilgrimages to Bardsey counted the same as a trip to Rome.

A stone marker on the old pilgrimage path exhorts us to "respect the remains of 20,000 saints buried near this spot." In this moorland lie holy people whose names are known by God alone, barefoot pilgrims who braved the dangerous tides to die here.

The marked graves, often with inscriptions in Welsh, honor those with names still remembered -- including Robert Williams, the priest for more than 40 years for the last permanent congregation on Bardsey, of which my family was a part. One senses, beneath one's feet, in the birds wheeling above, the sure presence of something timeless and sacred.

The early monastery dated from Celtic times, a community established in the 400s, one of the final stands of Celtic Christianity. Legend says that Merlin came here to die. In the 13th century, an abbey, now in ruins, was built here for an Augustinian community.

My Welsh relatives were raised on the island in the '20s and '30s, leaving with a transport of ponies and sheep during the war years. The island now is all but uninhabited except for seabirds. I sense that the human presence here always has been secondary to the spiritual.

Although the sea passage is difficult, it is easy for a modern-day pilgrim to explore Bardsey: less than a mile across and two miles long, with the remains of stone walls, a few houses and a lighthouse that no longer marks the spot with its light. Orithologists visit the island for seabird migrations, which are spectacular, and occasional pilgrims spend a night or a summer on Bardsey. But all I saw after I said goodbye to the lobsterman who dropped me off that morning was a brief glimpse of a Connemara pony, a lone farmhouse that seemed to sleep in a Brigadoon mist and sheep that regarded me with placid indifference.

I was sorely in need of healing, both in body and in spirit, when I spent that April day on Bardsey. Sensing those innumerable saints, the power that drew them to this windswept place, the difficulty of getting to the island and the peace that flooded through me, hearing Be Thou My Vision in my head in counterpoint with the wind on the high bluff where I sat looking out to sea, calmed my heart and caused a silent promise to well up somewhere deep inside, the blessing of Bardsey.

-- Linda Radtke lives in Middlesex, Vermont, and worships at St. Mary's Episcopal Church in Northfield, Vermont.

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