The Lindisfarne Gospels, the most spectacular manuscript to survive from Anglo-Saxon England, is returning home. Laura Gascoigne analyses the remarkable journey through history of this masterpiece of illumination

A large timber building has gone up in a former haulier’s yard outside the Northumbrian village of Wooler. Situated on the edge of Northumberland’s National Park, it could be a local craft emporium or farm shop; in fact, it’s a re-creation of the great hall of the summer palace of King Edwin of Northumbria at Yeavering, 12 miles as the seagull flies from Lindisfarne.

The Ferguson family, owners of a local haulage firm, have long dreamt of resurrecting Edwin’s early medieval palace on the site first discovered in aerial photographs in 1949 – a dream they are now in the process of realising, part-financed by an adjacent whisky distillery. Northumbrian whisky is not such a strange idea: at its height, the Anglo-Saxon kingdom of Northumbria embraced a swathe of southern Scotland as far north as the Firth of Forth.