Adam Rattray, the daring adventurer and wild swimmer, resolved, with two companions, to match Robson Green’s recent achievement in swimming the icy waters between the Northumbrian mainland and the Holy Island of Lindisfarne.

Both men chose to disregard the conventional means of access to the island – the causeway of which Sir Walter Scott writes, where

‘Twice a day the waves efface

Of staves and sandalled feet the trace’

– but Green is a tough Northumbrian and Adam half a Viking, descended, no doubt, from some of the fierce marauders who sacked Lindisfarne Priory in 793 and again in 875. According to the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, the earlier sack was presaged by ‘whirlwinds, lightning storms and fiery dragons seen in the sky’. The seas were hardly enticing for Adam’s visit – in September 2010 – but at least the dragons stayed away. Here is his typically modest account of the feat: