History, Authenticity and Tourism: Encountering the Medieval Walking St Cuthbert’s Way By Carole Cusack

https://www.academia.edu/1692327/History_Authenticity_and_Tourism_Encountering_the_Medieval_Walking_St_Cuthbert_s_Way?email_work_card=title This chapter investigates three interlocking discourses that inform the marketing of, and the experience of walking, St Cuthbert’s Way: history (particularly the discourses of medievalism), tourism (evoking the religious pilgrimage), and identity (focused on the transformative notion of authenticity). Inaugurated in 1996, St Cuthbert’s Way is a 62-mile (100 kilometre) heritage trail that connects the picturesque town of Melrose in the Scottish Borders to the ‘Holy Island’ of Lindisfarne (a tidal island on the Northumbrian coast). The walk is named for Cuthbert, Bishop of Lindisfarne (c. 634-687 CE), who in life and death was peculiarly engaged with religious travel. He became a monk at Melrose in 651 CE and throughout his life journeyed extensively in Scotland and the north of England, allegedly founding churches in St Andrews and Edinburgh, among other sites. He was buried on Lindisfarne, and after his death a significant pilgrimage cult grew up around him and his relics. In 875 his body was exhumed by the monks who departed Holy Island due to persistent Vikings raids, and carried to locations as far apart as Melrose, Whithorn, Ripon, and Chester-le-Street, before he was interred in a splendid tomb in Durham’s Norman cathedral in 1104 CE. His tomb was a popular place of pilgrimage and devotion until the Reformation, when Catholic shrines and sacred places in the landscape were disestablished or destroyed by Protestants who viewed such phenomena as ‘pagan’. The discourse of medievalism (like other positions focused on an ‘other’ to Western modernity such as orientalism) posits that the appeal of the medieval is linked to the notion that contemporary life is inauthentic and unsatisfying when compared to the ‘authenticity’ of the past. This is linked to the contemporary Western desire to be ‘spiritual’ while remaining outside of formal religion, which has resulted in religious practices such as pilgrimage being disembedded from traditional faith institutions, and becoming intimately imbricated with secular practices like travel, creating ‘fusion’ phenomena including spiritual tourism. Such practices are part of the quest for an authentic self that is core to contemporary Western spirituality, and which involves material consumption and bricolage. This ‘spirituality’ shares with medievalism the suspicion of Western modernity and secular culture and a yearning for an authentic personal identity. St Cuthbert, a historically significant figure, has been invoked in discussions of the development of English/British ‘identity’ in the early Middle Ages, and it has also been speculated that through the experience of landscape, modern people can encounter the past and encounter figures such as Cuthbert, and experience them ‘authentically’. ..