Peter Costello
Iona: The Other Island words by Kenneth Steven, photographs by Iain Sarjeant (St Andrews Press, €18.99 / £14.99 pb)
How well I remember my first visit to Iona, associated in all our minds with St Columcille. On a hot August afternoon the ferry glided over the crystal clear water over the sheer white sand at the bottom of the channel between Mull and the island as if it were floating in air towards one of the mysterious islands out of ancient Irish legend. Of course, it was not really mysterious, so much as spiritual.
In summer the place is crowded, indeed over-crowded – other months of the year provide quieter times for a visit. However, there are many sites aside from the main church on the island to walk to and to muse and pray at.
St Columcille and his monks approached the island in the same way, seeking in isolation “a desert” in which to establish their monastery in exile.
The island – then called Hy, Iona is the result of a later scribal error – lay on the boundary between the native Picts and the invading Irish keen to establish a new colonial Gaelic kingdom in Alba. The monastery acted in a way as a go-between.
The tide of history seemed for a moment to be with the expanding Irish kingdom – the foundation of the modern Scotland now seeking its independence – but it too suffered a reversal at the hands of more Romanised missionaries from the south and later from the the Normans.
Important figure
St Columcille remains an important figure in the early church in these islands.
This is more than can be said for St Ninian, the founder of Whitethorn abbey according to Bede, but who an academic has just announced to be a figment of the historical imagination.
Whatever the reviews and reversals of historians, Iona remains one of the most numinous places in these islands. Yet it is not an end in itself, it will lead the visitor on to other islands, and for those seeking spiritual experiences, on to other kinds of discoveries.
The island and the surrounding seas are beautifully conveyed in the words and images of this book, which will be a delightful reminder to anyone one who knows Iona, and an encouragement to those who don’t as yet. Kenneth Steven writes as a poet whose imagination has long been deeply engaged with the island.
Perhaps the purchase of this book will inspire pilgrims to make the complicated journey to Scotland itself, and then through the long barren glens of Mull, to the shore of the channel over to Iona.
It is a more than worthwhile place to see at least once in a life time.
