In Pursuit of Spring
Stobo Kirk is one of the oldest churches in the Borders - once the principal church of the Upper Tweed Valley in medieval times. It is said that St Kentigern - St Mungo - converted Merlin here.
My first sight of Stobo brings relief. The journey along the A72 had been hard going - blizzard conditions tearing across the Borders landscape, the van nudged by crosswinds.
When I arrive at the church, Sunday service is about to begin. In the porch I am greeted by a smartly dressed gentleman in a tweed jacket. Have you travelled far? he asks. From Bury - north of Manchester. His face lights. I worked down there in textiles. I glance at his jacket - its weave, its pattern - and think about the strange pattern of connection and how threads cross. I think about how strangers recognise one another through geography, through craft and shared ground.
Through his words he reaches back to my home and draws a root from it and ties it into this place. His welcome feels like an embrace.
The church is an embrace too.
It has been holding this valley for centuries - and before that, something else held it. The Norman fabric enfolds ancient stones. One of them - set into the wall - looks like a whale: a creature from deep time surfacing into the stony present. Later, as I sketch it, a word begins to surface, one that rises above all the incremental shifts of belief this place has known.
Sacred.
It’s a word that isn’t confined to doctrine - but is more about the way we value things. It’s an instinct that feels inherent - to mark certain places, certain stones, certain gestures, as set apart. It may be the cosmos, a standing stone, a tree or a child’s smile - or the simple grace of a man in a porch who chooses to connect.
Inside the north transept - now a Christian altar - rests a pagan stone reputedly brought here by Mungo himself - its meaning changed but the sacred has remained intact, threaded through from pagan to Christian.
Stobo does not feel like a site of replacement - one faith laid over another. It feels cumulative. As if each age has added its own layer of reverence without entirely silencing what came before. The sacred here is not fragile - it is sedimentary, held, quite literally, within the walls.
On my first day, in pursuit of spring, I have found a stone carried forward, a pattern recognised, a welcome received and the warmth of humanity within a blizzard - and with it, a sense of the sacred threaded through humanity itself.
Weather: Sleet and snow, 0 degrees Celsius.
Observations: Snow drops in Stobo Kirk churchyard.
Total Miles Travelled: 187
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