Over breakfast we sailed from Tobermory to Craignure, where our coach was waiting to take us across the Ross of Mull to meet the ferry for Iona. The inimitable Samuel Johnson (sometimes knows as Dr. Johnson) referenced Iona in his classic account of a journey taken in these waters in 1773, A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland, in which he makes the classic case for travel in any age: “That man is little to be envied, whose patriotism would not gain force upon the plain of Marathon, or whose piety would not grow warm among the ruins of Iona”.
Iona is indeed a very special place and few are impervious to its spiritual atmosphere. It has long been a place of pilgrimage. In the cemetery beside the abbey church lies the mortal remains of the High King of Scotland, Norway and Lords of the Isles, that remarkable polity that was an amalgam of the Gaelic and Norse worlds of northern Britain in the Middle Ages. Its renown derived from the fact that Iona was where Columba established his monastic community in A.D. 563, bringing Celtic Christianity from its western redoubt in Ireland where it flourished in the sixth century, as the light of the Christian faith was extinguished in continental Europe following the fall of Rome. From Iona the faith spread to the Pictis lands to the east and then to the Anglo-Saxon kingdom of Northumbria to the south. It was on Iona that the Book of Kells was produced, one of the glories of early mediaeval western art.
The ecclesiastical buildings that enthrall visitors to the island today are all mediaeval and post-date the Celtic Christian period. There are the ruins of an early thirteenth-century Augustinian Abbey, constructed of pink granite from the neighboring island of Mull, an early Romanesque chapel and the restored the Benedictine Abbey, which is the base of the contemporary Iona community. Founded in the 1930s by the redoubtable George Macleod, then a priest with the disadvantaged community of Govan in Glasgow as his parish, his vision was to restore the abbey so that the island would become an ecumenical centre of renewal for the Christian churches of these islands. At the time this seemed an unlikely project but it succeeded. A group of us opted to attend the short afternoon service for peace and justice that is held daily in the abbey at two o’clock in the afternoon. MacLeod famously described the island as “a thin place” where the boundaries between the material and the spiritual are to be found in close proximity.
After a good lunch at the aptly-named St Columba Hotel we crossed back over to Mull and visited Duart Castle, a baronial pile that is the ancestral seat of the Maclean clan. From banqueting room to dungeon, the latter with gruesome sound effects, we savored the mediaeval atmosphere before returning to the ship. During dinner we sailed for the picturesque harbor of Oban on the mainland to dock in sight of the eighteenth-century whisky distillery that we shall visit tomorrow morning.
