Iona was once the beating heart of Celtic Christianity
The only thing it lacked was a desert—so the monks imagined one.
For me, pilgrimage begins with the Isle of Iona. I started going there with my parents in the earliest days of childhood. We traveled from the heart of landlocked Perthshire: as the crow flies it’s a couple of wing beats to Iona, while by car it involved a two-hour journey west to Oban, a ferry to the Isle of Mull, a long and beautiful drive across that island, and then a second short ferry crossing to Iona. In those days a small passenger ferry took pilgrims to Iona; I had the sense of reaching the outer edge of some tectonic plate or even the edge of the world.
I felt, doubtless like tens of thousands of Iona pilgrims each year, that I had gone back in time. Iona was a place of remoteness and quiet, little changed, I imagined, from the island Columba found when he landed in the sixth century. I felt its isolation when I walked alone to Sandeels Bay in the middle of the island’s east coast or when I battled against the omnipresent winds to the south end of Iona and St. Columba’s Bay. Despite roads and telephones, this was still the Iona the saint had come to find and from which he and his followers had gone out with the Christian story.
That sense of Iona as an edge place pleased me and stayed with me. I was entirely content with it until one day several years ago when I attended a lecture by an archaeologist in Glasgow.
