28 Years Later | St Cuthbert's Cave — Sandstone Overhang on the Pilgrim Road

A slab of sandstone leaning out over a hollow, held up by one thick pillar of rock, with beech and pine crowding the slope behind it. Monks are said to have rested St Cuthbert's body here in 875 while fleeing Viking raids on Lindisfarne, carrying the saint inland rather than leave him to be taken. Eleven hundred years of shelter for people moving through hostile country — which is exactly the register 28 Years Later works in, and why the production came up here to shoot.

It is a twenty-minute climb from the small National Trust car park at Holburn Grange, through a farm gate and up a track. The cave is open, free, and never crowded. Visitors have been carving initials into the soft rock since at least the eighteenth century, and the older ones have weathered into something closer to lichen than lettering.

Turn around at the mouth of the cave and look north-east. On a clear day you can see Holy Island out on the water, which is the whole story of the place in one line of sight.

Photo: Wikimedia Commons (geograph.org.uk, CC BY-SA 2.0).