We sailed from Oban to Craignure on the Isle of Mull where our coach was waiting to take us across the island to meet the ferry for Iona. The inimitable 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. It the cemetery beside the abbey church lie the mortal remains of High Kings of Scotland, of 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 563 A.D. 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 Pictish 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 all the mediaeval a postdate the Celtic Christian period, 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, the latter 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. In the 1930s this seemed an unlikely project but it succeeded and a group from the ship 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 Tobermory, the principal settlement on Mull. After dinner we were visited by the owners of “Wings over Mull,” a raptor sanctuary, who brought a selection of birds of prey for us to view at close quarters.
