Monument To St Cuthbert Unveiled At Lindisfarne Monastery. A new monument to St Cuthbert - one of Britain’s holiest of saints - has been unveiled at the Lindisfarne monastery in Northumberland.
The unveiling of the new monument on 17 February 2023 is accompanied by an exhibition of previously unseen treasures. These include Britain’s first known prayer bead necklace, one of the earliest surviving examples of knitting found in Europe, and a recently discovered Anglo-Saxon glass gaming counter. Lindisfarne – also known as Holy Island – was one of the centres of early English Christianity and one of the first places to be devastated by Viking raids.
The new monument in the priory ruins marks the spot of the original shrine to St Cuthbert, northern England’s most revered saint. Sometime in the 670s, a monk named Cuthbert joined the monastery at Lindisfarne. He eventually became Lindisfarne’s greatest monk-bishop, and the most important saint in northern England in the Middle Ages.
Cuthbert died on 20 March 687 and was buried in a stone coffin inside the main church on Lindisfarne. 11 years later the monks opened his tomb and discovered that his body had not decayed and miracles were soon reported at St Cuthbert’s shrine.
As a result, Lindisfarne was quickly established as the major pilgrimage centre in Northumbria. However, St Cuthbert’s coffin was removed from Lindisfarne and eventually buried in Durham Cathedral. As no evidence of his original shrine survives, English Heritage commissioned the new monument, designed by sculptor Russ Coleman, to mark where the saint’s original burial place and the site of the ‘miracles’.
It is made from large a basalt boulder found locally and Frosterly marble as a nod to the grave slab that marks St Cuthbert’s final resting place at Durham.