59. Sussex flint, for Dicul

Chichester Harbour on the Sussex coast

From where I am standing on the South coast of England, Ireland is only a few days' sail away down one of the great highways of history, the English Channel. Over the centuries, people here have watched the comings and goings of Roman galleys, Saxon invaders, continental traders, Viking longships and, in the seventh century, a small band of Irish monks who sailed up the estuary in a boat made of leather.

They landed at the small village of Bosham, just across the creek from my family's farm, where they founded the first Christian monastery in this part of England. Their leader was a man called Dicul, but little else is known about them.

Bosham Church, probable site of Dicul's monastery

On a silvery afternoon I paddled a kayak up the tide to Bosham, thinking of Dicul and his companions. They would have been perigrini, self-imposed exiles committed to wandering where God took them, part of the extraordinary expansion of Celtic Christianity from Ireland that took place in the 6th and 7th centuries. Why here, I wonder? Here, with its good soil, gentle climate and Romano-British culture, so different from the wild, harsh locations on rocky outcrops and remote Atlantic islands favoured by some of their contemporaries.

Local flints

I imagine them farming, fishing and praying; building their oratory and cells from wattle and daub, perhaps inset with flints. No Connemara granite or Burren limestone here, but a softer landscape of chalk and clay, with knobbly flints the only really hard material. I imagine Dicul weighing flints in his hand, thinking of the stony fields of his homeland across the sea and embracing his new life with humility and grace.