Carefully Selected Scottish Holiday Homes in Beautiful Locations
Isle of Iona
Less than a mile off the southwest tip of Mull, IONA - just three miles long and not much more than a mile wide - has been a place of pilgrimage for several centuries, and a place of Christian worship for more than 1400 years. For it was to this flat Hebridean island that St Columba fled from Ireland in 563 and established a monastery which was responsible for the conversion of more or less all of pagan Scotland as well as much of northern England. This history and the island's splendid isolation have lent it a peculiar religiosity; in the much-quoted words of Dr Johnson, who visited in 1773, "that man is little to be envied . whose piety would not grow warmer among the ruins of Iona". Today, however, the island can barely cope with the constant flood of day-trippers, and charges visitors entry to its abbey, so to appreciate the special atmosphere and to have time to see the whole island, including the often overlooked west coast, you should plan on staying at least one night.
The passenger ferry from Fionnphort drops you off at the island's main village, BAILE MÓR (literally "large village"), which is in fact little more than a single terrace of cottages facing the sea. Just inland lie the extensive pink granite ruins of the Augustinian nunnery, built with pink granite around 1200, but disused since the Reformation - if nothing else, it gives you an idea of the state of the present-day abbey before it was restored. Across the road to the north is the Iona Heritage Centre (April-Oct Mon-Sat 10.30am-4.30pm; £1.50), with displays on the social history of the island over the last 200 years, including the Clearances, which nearly halved the island's population of 500 in the mid-nineteenth century. At a bend in the road, just south of the manse and church, stands the fifteenth-century MacLean's Cross, a fine late medieval example of the distinctive, flowing, three-leaved foliage of the Iona school.
No buildings remain from Columba's time: the present abbey (daily: April-Sept 9.30am-6.30pm; Oct-March 9.30am-4.30pm; HS; £2.80) dates from the arrival of the Benedictines in around 1200, was extensively rebuilt in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and restored virtually wholesale early last century. Adjoining the facade is a small steep-roofed chamber, believed to be St Columba's grave, now a small chapel. The three high crosses in front of the abbey date from the eighth to tenth centuries, and are decorated with the Pictish serpent and boss and Celtic spirals for which Iona's early Christian masons were renowned. For reasons of sanitation, the cloisters were placed, contrary to the norm, on the north side of the church (where running water was available); entirely reconstructed in the late 1950s, they now shelter a useful historical account of the abbey's development.
Iona's oldest building, the plain-looking St Oran's Chapel, lies south of the abbey, and boasts an eleventh-century door. Oran's Chapel stands at the centre of Iona's sacred burial ground, Reilig Odhráin (Oran's Cemetery), which is said to contain the graves of sixty kings of Norway, Ireland, France and Scotland, including Duncan and Macbeth. The best of the early Christian gravestones and medieval effigies which once lay in the Reilig Odhráin have unfortunately been removed to the Infirmary Museum, behind the abbey.
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