Iona Abbey

Iona Abbey stands on the small island of Iona, off the Isle of Mull, on the western edge of what is now Argyll. It is one of the oldest Christian centres in western Europe, and for centuries it was a base from which Christianity spread through northern Britain. The island and the house were once called Hy, or Hii. The name Iona appears only from the fourteenth century, as a misreading of a Latin form, Ioua, written for Hy.

The stone church that visitors walk through today is a medieval Benedictine abbey, restored in the twentieth century, on the ground where an Irish monk and his companions settled in 563.

Before that settlement, the west coast already belonged to a Gaelic kingdom. Dál Riata lay across the sea between northeastern Ireland and Argyll. In Scotland it was made up of four kindreds: the Cenél nGabráin in Kintyre, the Cenél nÓengusa on Islay, the Cenél Loairn in Lorn, and the Cenél Comgaill in Cowal. Dunadd is believed to have been its capital, with other royal forts at Dunollie, Dunaverty and Dunseverick.

The kingdom lived by the sea and kept a large fleet. No written account survives from its pre-Christian years. The earliest records come from the chroniclers of Iona and of the Irish monasteries. In the time of Patrick, kings of Dál Riata thought of themselves as descended from Celtic gods, and people in the region treated springs and groves as sacred.

By the middle of the sixth century the Scottish portion of the kingdom was under pressure from Bridei, king of the Picts, while the Irish portion faced the Dál nAraidi of Ulster and looked to the Northern Uí Néill for help.

Saint Columba was born into that Irish world on 7 December 521. He was a son of Fedlimid and Eithne of the Cenél Conaill, in Gartan, in Tír Chonaill, the country that is now mostly County Donegal. On his father's side he was claimed as a great-great-grandson of Niall of the Nine Hostages. He was baptised at Temple-Douglas by his foster-uncle Cruithnechán.

His name in Irish, Colmcille, means dove, the same meaning as the Latin Columba. Adomnán of Iona thought Colmcille was the name he was given at birth. Other Irish sources say he was born Crimthann, meaning fox. He spent about five years in the remote district later called Glencolmcille.

When he was advanced enough in letters he entered the monastic school of Movilla, at Newtownards, under Finnian of Movilla, who had studied at Ninian's great monastery in Galloway. He was about twenty, and a deacon, when he left Movilla for Leinster and became a pupil of an aged bard named Gemman. From there he went to Clonard, on the Boyne, under Finnian of Clonard, who had been trained in the schools of David in Wales. Clonard was said to have about three hundred scholars.

Columba became one of twelve pupils of Finnian later called the Twelve Apostles of Ireland, and he was ordained a priest. He also studied with Mobhí Clárainech at Glasnevin, alongside Cainnech of Aghaboe, Comgall and Ciarán. A pestilence in 544 scattered Mobhí's disciples, and Columba returned to Ulster.

The years that followed are credited with several Irish houses: Derry, at the southern edge of Inishowen; Durrow, in what is now County Offaly; Kells, in County Meath; and Swords. While he was at Derry he is said to have planned a pilgrimage to Rome and Jerusalem and to have got no farther than Tours, from where he brought a copy of gospels that had lain on the breast of Martin. He also crossed back from Scotland more than once in later life to visit the communities he had founded. Some traditions place a quarrel with Finnian of Movilla, around 560, over a psalter that Columba had copied in Finnian's scriptorium and meant to keep.

There is a suggestion that the quarrel led to the Battle of Cúl Dreimhne, fought in 561 in Cairbre Drom Cliabh, now in County Sligo, in which many men were killed. Richard Sharpe, who translated Adomnán's life of the saint, warned against tying that battle to Columba's departure from Ireland, even though the annals show that Columba supported his own king against the high king. The political quarrel was already old. One grievance was the killing of Prince Curnan of Connacht, a kinsman of Columba, who had fatally injured a rival in a hurling match, taken refuge with the saint, and then been dragged out and slain by the men of King Diarmait, in defiance of sanctuary.

A synod of clerics and scholars threatened to excommunicate Columba for the deaths. Brendan of Birr spoke for him, and the process came to be treated as a miscarriage of justice. His own conscience was uneasy. On the advice of an aged hermit, Molaise, he resolved to leave Ireland.

Some accounts call the departure an exile. Pilgrimage is the word used more often. A marker at Stroove, on Inishowen, commemorates a place of embarkation. The copied psalter has been traditionally identified with the Cathach of Saint Columba.

In 574 or 575, when he returned for the gathering at Druim Cett, he founded the monastery of Drumcliff in Cairbre.

In 563 Saint Columba travelled to Scotland with twelve companions, among them, it is said, Odran of Iona. They crossed in a wicker currach covered with leather. Legend has him land first on Kintyre, near Southend, and then move farther north because Ulster was still in sight. The island was made over to him by his kinsman Conall mac Comgaill, king of Dál Riata, who may have invited him.

Another account says that Áedán mac Gabráin, under whom Dál Riata reached its greatest extent, granted Iona and was consecrated by Columba. He was not stepping into a foreign people in any simple sense. Gaels from Ulster had already lived along that coast for a couple of centuries. He became a diplomat among the tribes as well as the guide of what was, for a time, the only centre of literacy in the region.

The monastery he founded belonged to his own kindred, the Cenél Conaill of the Northern Uí Néill, rather than to Dál Riata itself, though it kept close ties with the Cenél nGabráin. Those ties may colour the annals. At the convention of Druim Cett, near Limavady, in 575, Columba negotiated an alliance between Dál Riata and the Cenél Conaill. With him were Áedán mac Gabráin and Áed mac Ainmuirech, king of the Northern Uí Néill and high king of Ireland.

The aim of the new house was not, first of all, a mission in the later sense. Columba wanted a perfect monastery, an image of the heavenly city of Jerusalem, a pattern of Christian virtue that others might copy. The monks worshipped and worked each day in the manner of Celtic Christianity. They managed the goods of the house and dealt with the people around them and farther off.

Like other monasteries of that tradition, the first buildings were of wattle and timber, or of wood and thatch: a church or oratory, a refectory or kitchen, a library or scriptorium, cells or a dormitory, and a guest house for visitors and pilgrims. A ditch and an earth bank, the vallum, enclosed the settlement. Part of that bank is thought to be older than Columba's arrival, and a stretch of it can still be seen to the northwest of the later abbey. Around the year 800 the original wooden chapel is believed to have been replaced in stone.

Adomnán describes a building on a small mound, Tòrr an Aba, where Columba worked and wrote. Charred wood has been dated from what is believed to be that site, and a socket that once held a cross, put up later, is still visible there.

Saint Columba did not stay inside the bank. He visited the pagan king Bridei, king of Fortriu, at his base in Inverness. Adomnán says that he won Bridei's respect but not his conversion, and that he spoke to the Picts through an unnamed interpreter. Bede records the visit as well, and passes on a later tradition, perhaps a Pictish one, in which Columba does convert the king.

The life written on Iona also tells of a fierce water beast in the River Ness in 565, which had killed a Pict and then turned on Columba's disciple Lugne. Columba is said to have driven it back into the depths. The story belongs to the miracles of a saint's life, and later readers have sometimes set it beside tales of a monster in the loch. He founded other churches in the Hebrides and made Iona a school for missionaries.

He was credited with hymns and with the copying of three hundred books. Two Latin poems still attributed to him, Adiutor Laborantium and Altus Prosator, are abecedarian hymns written while he was at the abbey. Traditional sources say he died on Iona on Sunday, 9 June 597, and was buried by his monks in the house he had made. Another reckoning, by Daniel P.

Mc Carthy, puts his death in 593. He is a patron of Derry and, with Patrick and Brigid, one of the patrons of Ireland. Both the Gaels of Dál Riata and the Picts venerated him.

The reach of the house showed itself in the next generation. Saint Aidan was an Irish monk at Iona from a relatively young age. Bede, whose account is the basis of almost everything known about him, says almost nothing of his early life beyond that, and a later tradition makes him a disciple of Senan on Inis Cathaigh. He may have been born in Connacht.

His name is an English form of Aodhán, little fiery one. In the years before his mission, Anglo-Saxon paganism had pushed Christianity back across much of Britain. Oswald of Northumbria had been raised at Iona as a king in exile since 616, baptised there, and he took the Northumbrian crown in 634 with a vow to bring Christianity back to his people. Because of Iona, he asked that monastery for missionaries rather than the Roman houses of southern England.

The first man sent, a bishop named Cormán, alienated people by his harshness and went home saying the Northumbrians were too stubborn to be converted. Saint Aidan criticised those methods and was sent in his place. He became bishop in 635.

He chose Lindisfarne, close to the royal stronghold at Bamburgh, as his seat. He walked from village to village, talked to people as he found them, and was remembered for offering gentle teaching before harder demands. Oswald, who spoke Irish from his years of exile, often translated for Aidan and the monks, who did not at first speak English. Aidan built churches, monasteries and schools.

He took in orphans. Money given by the rich he used for the poor or to buy the freedom of people who had been sold as slaves, and he trained some of those he had ransomed for the priesthood. He rarely rode. If he ate with the king he took a small meal and left quickly to read or write.

In his time many religious men and women fasted on Wednesdays and Fridays until the ninth hour, except during the fifty days after Easter. When Oswald died in 642, Oswine of Deira continued to support him, and the two were close. In 651 Penda of Mercia ravaged Northumbria as far as Bamburgh, failed to take the royal city by storm or siege, and tried to burn it with a great pile of timber. Aidan was then on the Isle of Fame, about two miles from the city, where he often went to pray.

Seeing the smoke, he is said to have cried out at the evil Penda was doing, and the wind turned the flames back on the attackers. He died on 31 August 651 and was buried at Lindisfarne, under the church he had founded. His cult later thinned. In the eleventh century monks of Glastonbury obtained what were claimed to be his relics, and his feast entered early Wessex calendars.

He is honoured on 31 August. Through him, Iona's version of Christianity reached Northumbria, and from there it touched Mercia and lands beyond.

Adomnán carried the same house into the politics of the late seventh century. Born about 624, probably in or near Raphoe in Donegal, he was a kinsman of Columba on his father's side, of the Cenél Conaill, the son of Rónán mac Tinne and of Ronat of the Cenél nÉnda. He may have begun monastic life at Druim Tuamma, or at Durrow, or at some other Columban house. He probably joined the family of monasteries led by Iona around 640.

Richard Sharpe argued that he came to the island during the abbacy of Ségéne, who died in 652. Others have thought he could not have arrived before 669. Wherever he was taught, his learning was rare in northern Europe of that age. In 679 he became the ninth abbot of Iona after Columba, and he held the office until his death in 704.

He was a friend of Aldfrith, king of Northumbria. Aldfrith stayed with him on Iona in 684. In 686, after Aldfrith's brother Ecgfrith had died and Aldfrith had taken the kingdom, Adomnán went to Northumbria at the request of Fínsnechta Fledach, king of Brega, to seek the freedom of sixty Gaels captured in a Northumbrian raid two years earlier. He made further journeys among the English.

Bede implies that on those visits, under the influence of Ceolfrith, Adomnán accepted the Roman dating of Easter that had been settled at Whitby, and that the choice opened a split at Iona. He seems not to have persuaded his own monks to adopt that dating, or the Roman tonsure. He did adopt the Roman date himself, and he argued for it in Ireland. Around 697, at the Synod of Birr, before Irish, Dál Riatan and Pictish notables, he promulgated the Cáin Adomnáin, the Law of the Innocents, a set of rules meant to protect non-combatants in war.

Between about 697 and 700 he wrote the Life of Columba, the most important surviving work written in early medieval Scotland, and a principal window onto the Picts and onto the daily life of Iona. He arranged the stories by theme rather than by year, in a form that owes something to the life of Martin of Tours, and he presented Columba in terms a Gaelic audience would recognise in a hero. He also wrote On the Holy Places, drawing on Arculf, a Frankish bishop who had seen Egypt, Rome, Constantinople and the Holy Land and then came to Iona. Adomnán gave a copy to Aldfrith.

A body of Gaelic verse is attributed to him, including a poem on the Pictish king Bridei's victory over the Northumbrians at the Battle of Dun Nechtain in 685. Adomnán died in 704. His feast is 23 September. In 727 his relics were taken to Ireland to renew his law, and in 730 they were brought back to Iona.

The work of the scriptorium outlasted any single abbot. Annals compiled on Iona were taken up into the Chronicle of Ireland down to about 740. The Book of Kells, also called the Book of Columba, is a Latin gospel book of about 800, largely from the Vulgate with passages from the older Latin Bible, and it is counted among the high points of Insular painting. It was not made by Columba, who had been dead for two centuries.

An old tradition that it was his own work has long been set aside on the evidence of script and style. There is another tradition that it was made for the two-hundredth anniversary of his death. Its home for centuries was the abbey of Kells, which was founded or refounded from Iona, the building work running from 807 to the consecration of the church in 814. Where the book was made is still argued.

It may have been begun on Iona and finished at Kells. It may have been made entirely on Iona, or entirely at Kells, or, though no Pictish manuscript survives to support the idea, at Dunkeld or another house in Pictland. The first of those accounts is the one most widely accepted. Whichever is preferred, the book was the work of Columban monks closely tied to Iona.

Charles Reginald Dodwell, a British art historian who specialised in the years from 800 to 1200, is among those associated with the view that the monks of Iona produced it in the years leading up to 800, in his study of the pictorial arts of the West across that span. The earliest notice that is generally taken to be this book is an entry for 1007 in the Annals of Ulster: the great Gospel of Columba, called the chief relic of the western world, was stolen at night from the western sacristy of the great stone church at Kells for the sake of its wrought shrine, and was found months later under a sod, without the gold and jewels of the cover. The book remained at Kells into the seventeenth century and then passed to Dublin.

Stone was the other public art of the monastery. Standing crosses and recumbent slabs marked graves. Large crosses, especially in the centuries from 800 to 1000, seem to have been set up to declare the Christian message, and their carving echoes crosses made of precious metal. Some were cut from stone brought by boat from Loch Sween, some fifty nautical miles away.

Saint Martin's Cross, dated to the eighth century, still stands by the road. A replica of Saint John's Cross stands by the abbey door, and the restored original is kept in the museum in the old infirmary. Wood-turning and metal-working have been found on the island, and glass for windows and beads that may belong to the seventh century. Pigments from the south of France were used here, a sign of how the sea lane and Columba's own aristocratic connections carried goods as well as books.

The position of the island on a used seaway made that trade possible.

Then the same sea brought raiders. The abbey was attacked in 795, again in 802, again in 806, and again in 825. In 806, sixty-eight monks were killed at Martyrs' Bay, and many of the Columban community moved to the new house at Kells. Cellach, abbot of Iona, retired to Kells in 814.

Contrary to a claim sometimes made, the annals show that Iona remained the chief Columban house for several decades after that, in spite of the danger. In 825 Blathmac and the monks who stayed with him were killed, and the abbey was burned. A ninth-century account of Blathmac's death speaks of the precious metals in which the holy bones of Columba lay, which is to say that a richly made shrine was already on the island. Only later were the principal relics removed.

One account places that removal in 849, when the relics were divided between Scotland and Ireland. Another places the move of the main relics, Columba's shrine among them, in 878, with Kells then becoming the chief house. It may have been then that the gospel book came to Kells, though that is not stated. The island was probably not abandoned.

Its continued importance is shown by a death there in 980.

That death was the end of a long career in the Norse-Gaelic world. Amlaíb Cuarán, Amlaíb son of Sitriuc, whose byname means sandal, was king of Northumbria and of Dublin, and the last of the Uí Ímair to play a major part in the politics of Britain and Ireland. He ruled those territories, on and off, for some forty years. He was a renowned warrior and a ruthless pillager of churches, and he ended his days in retirement at Iona Abbey.

His father Sitriuc seized Dublin in 917, after an Irish king had held it since the expulsion of earlier Viking rulers in 902, and Sitriuc ruled Northumbria until his own death in 927. A chronicle records Sitriuc's marriage to a sister of Æthelstan at Tamworth on 30 January 926, and later writers say Amlaíb was their son. Amlaíb's own recorded career begins in 941, after the death of his cousin Amlaíb son of Gofraid. He shared York with his cousin Ragnall until 944, when Edmund drove both of them out.

A baptism in which Edmund stood as godfather need not mean that Amlaíb had not already been a Christian, and such baptisms were often political. He returned to Ireland, replaced his cousin Blácaire as ruler of Dublin, and allied with Congalach, the high king. Defeat at Slane in 947 cost him that kingship for a time. In 949 the Northumbrians invited him back to York.

In 952 he was deposed and replaced by a Scandinavian king named Eiríkr, usually identified with Eric Bloodaxe. That second reign was short. Eric Bloodaxe, Eric son of Harald, is recorded as king of Northumbria from 947 to 948 and again from 952 to 954, and the saga tradition also makes him king of Norway from 932 to 934. Most historians since the start of the twentieth century have treated the Norwegian Eric and the Northumbrian Eric as one man, but Clare Downham has argued that later Norse writers fused two Erics, so the identification is not settled.

When Eric died in 954 the Viking kingdom of York was taken into the English kingdom, and Amlaíb went back to Ireland.

There he married Dúnflaith and became stepfather to her son Máel Sechnaill. He attacked the abbey of Kells in 969 during a war with Domnall ua Néill. In 977 the annals credit him with the deaths of two of Domnall's sons. In 980, by then an old man, he did not fight in person at Tara.

His sons did, with warriors from the Isle of Man or the Hebrides, and Máel Sechnaill, supported by the Leinstermen, crushed them. Amlaíb's son Ragnall was among the dead. Amlaíb abdicated, or was removed. His son Glúniairn, Máel Sechnaill's half-brother, succeeded him in Dublin.

Amlaíb retired to the monastery on Iona and died soon afterwards. He was buried at the abbey. In life he had patronised Irish poets and Scandinavian skalds. In death he became a model for the later romance of Havelok the Dane.

His descendants were kings in Man and the Hebrides until the thirteenth century. One of his wives, Gormflaith, later married Brian Boru, and her son Sitric Silkbeard ruled Dublin after Glúniairn.

The raids on Iona in 795, 802, 806 and 825 belong to an earlier Norse phase than the great army that fought in England from 865. Halfdan Ragnarsson was a commander of that Great Heathen Army, called a heathen king in the English chronicle. The army landed in East Anglia in the autumn of 865, took York late in 866 while Northumbria was divided between Ælla and Osberht, and in 867 killed both kings. Halfdan became the leading commander in England after Ivar dropped out of the English record around 870.

That Ivar is generally taken to be the Ímar who died in 873 as king of the Northmen of all Britain and Ireland, and Ímar is the man from whom the Uí Ímair, Amlaíb's dynasty, are presumed to descend. Whether Ímar is the same person as Ivar the Boneless is less certain. Halfdan was the first Viking king of Northumbria and a pretender to Dublin. He died in 877 at the Battle of Strangford Lough, pressing his Irish claim, in the same generation as one of the dates given for the removal of Columba's shrine from Iona.

Nothing in the record makes him the leader of the earlier attacks on the abbey.

A later Norwegian king is sometimes treated as the last great figure of the Viking age, and he too has to be kept distinct from Iona. Harald Hardrada, Harald Sigurdsson, was king of Norway from 1046 to 1066. In September 1066 he invaded northern England with a large fleet, defeated the earls at Fulford on 20 September, and was killed at Stamford Bridge on 25 September, shot in the throat. Historians often take his death as the end of the Viking age.

Norse power in the Hebrides did not end with him. In 1114 a king of Norway seized Iona and held it for fifty years. Somerled then retook the island. In 1164 he invited renewed Irish involvement, and that invitation is tied to the building of the central part of the later cathedral.

In the same year the annals say he tried to persuade Flaithbertach Ua Brolcháin, abbot of Derry and head of the Columban monastic family, to move from Ireland to Iona, which would have put that leadership inside Somerled's own sphere. Muirchertach, Flaithbertach's secular overlord, opposed the plan. It came to nothing. Somerled was killed in 1164 at the Battle of Renfrew, at the start of a seaborne invasion of mainland Scotland, leading men drawn from Argyll, Kintyre, the Isles and Dublin.

A nineteenth-century tradition placed his burial at Saddell, but he is more likely to have been laid to rest on Iona, as a seventeenth-century tradition claims. Saint Oran's Chapel, the oldest intact building on the island, has Irish features that place it about the middle of the twelfth century. It may have been built by Somerled, by his son Ranald, or by the Crovan dynasty, and later descendants of Ranald used it as a mortuary chapel.

Somerled had tried to restore an old Columban order. His sons did something else. Around 1200 they founded a Benedictine abbey on the island. More precisely, Ranald, by then lord of the Isles, invited the Benedictines in 1203 to make a new monastery, and an Augustinian nunnery, on the foundations of the Columban house.

Work began on a new abbey church on the site of Columba's church. The next year, 1204, a force led by two Irish bishops raided the place, a reply by Ireland's Columban clergy to the loss of a site their own founder had made. The nunnery, south of the abbey, was founded by Somerled's daughter Bethóc, who is also named as its prioress. It was one of only three nunneries in Scotland, the others being in Perth and at Teampull na Trionaid in North Uist.

It is the most complete nunnery complex to survive in the country. The buildings were rebuilt in the fifteenth century. Graves of early nuns remain, among them the prioress Anna Maclean, who died in 1543. Under her outer robe the carved stone still shows the pleated rochet of the Augustinian order.

The nunnery fell into disrepair after the Reformation.

From 1207 to 1493 the lords of the Isles, of Clan Donald, were central to the abbey's standing. In the twelfth century the Macdonald lords had already made Iona the ecclesiastical capital of their royal kindred, and they endowed the abbey, the church and the nunnery into the early sixteenth century. Two of them, each named Angus, became bishops of the Isles, with the bishop's seat on Iona. The church was substantially enlarged in the fifteenth century.

The lords treated it as their spiritual seat and, in all but name, as their cathedral. The medieval building now restored is largely their legacy, and the legacy of the abbots and bishops of their kindred. Saint Oran's Chapel was their burial place, and their grave slabs are the evidence. Many early Scottish kings, a number given as forty-eight, together with kings from Ireland, Norway and France, are said to lie in the abbey graveyard.

Modern scholars are sceptical. The claim looks like a myth grown up to increase the prestige of the place. Burials that are better grounded include lords of the Isles and other leading people of the West Highlands, a row of Maclean chiefs, and several early chiefs of the MacLeods.

Monastic life on Iona ended with the Protestant Reformation of 1560. Pilgrimage to Columba's shrine had continued until then. The house was dismantled, as many abbeys in Britain were, and abandoned. Monks and libraries were dispersed.

Eighteenth-century engravings show the church and the cloister as roofless ruins. In 1899 the Duke of Argyll transferred the ruined abbey and nunnery to the Iona Cathedral Trust, which undertook a large restoration of the church. A simple square font was added in 1908 and dedicated to the memory of Theodore Marshall, moderator of the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland in that year.

The twentieth-century rebuilding is bound up with George MacLeod. Born in Glasgow on 17 June 1895, he served in the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders in the First World War, was wounded in spirit by Ypres and Passchendaele, and received the Military Cross in 1917 and the French Croix de Guerre in 1918. He trained for the ministry, worked at Govan Old Parish Church amid the poverty of the depression, and in 1938 gave up a parish stipend to lead the Iona Community, which he had founded that year and which he led until 1967. The idea that shaped the community was to rebuild the abbey with ministers, students and unemployed labourers working side by side.

In 1938 his inspiration brought a group that rebuilt the church and established the community. The reconstruction was organised by the architect Ian Gordon Lindsay, to whom his senior colleague Reginald Fairlie had passed the project. The surrounding buildings were rebuilt through the twentieth century by the community. It became an international ecumenical fellowship, with an emphasis on mission, political involvement, healing and worship, and with its headquarters in Glasgow.

The abbey remains its spiritual home, and a place of pilgrimage. George MacLeod was moderator of the General Assembly in 1957 and died on 27 June 1991. In 2000 the Iona Cathedral Trust handed the care of the abbey, the nunnery and the associated sites to Historic Scotland. In June 2021 the abbey reopened after a renovation costing £3.75 million, raised by the Iona Community over three years.

The work included a renewable energy system and high-speed broadband.

What the ground has given up in the last seventy years has changed the picture of the early monastery. Charles Thomas directed a large campaign of small trenches around the abbey. One account dates that work from 1953 to 1963, and about a hundred trenches; another dates the unpublished cuttings from 1956 to 1963. He did not live to publish most of it.

Elizabeth Fowler excavated on Tòrr an Aba in 1956 and 1957. On that mound the diggers found hazel charcoal from a wattle hut. The site had been deliberately covered with beach pebbles, and there was a hole for a post, perhaps a cross. Thomas thought this was Columba's cell, the place where Adomnán, writing about a century after the saint's death, has him sitting to write.

Radiocarbon dating was not then precise enough, or cheap enough, to test the idea. Thomas kept the samples, and in retirement he stored them in a garage in Truro. Around 2012 they passed into public care. In 2017 Ewan Campbell and Adrián Maldonado had the hazel dated.

The stakes fall between 540 and 650. Columba died in 597, or perhaps in 593. Maldonado described the result as within a standard deviation of Columba's lifetime, about as close as one can come to showing that the hut was standing while he was on the island. Richard Strachan, a senior archaeologist on the project, said the dates proved it.

Campbell noted how rare it is to tie excavated material to a named person, and how much that matters for a man whose monasteries carried learning across Europe. Thomas died in 2016, before the date was established.

The same season, in May 2017, new trenches reopened Thomas's old cuts. Just south of the medieval nave they found a large stone-built wall foundation. Radiocarbon dates put its building in the seventh or eighth century and its demolition in the tenth or eleventh, when graves of the eleventh and twelfth centuries cut through it. Maldonado said it was not supposed to be there.

At first it looked like an early church, aligned west to east, with a semi-circular eastern end. He later thought it more likely an early attempt to shore up sloping ground for a large and sophisticated church. A field account of the same wall describes a massive drystone structure, a revetment for a possible clay-bonded building with a curved end, perhaps an apsed church of the years before the Benedictines. A second trench through the vallum found organic material at the bottom of the ditch, showing that the ditch was open from at least the seventh century, within a few generations of Columba.

The inner bank was built with layers of peaty turf. The outer bank was slighter and edged with a stone kerb. Surveys of the fields north and south of the abbey have since traced several ditch lines, the sacred boundary written more than once into the ground. A rectilinear enclosure near the ruins of Saint Mary's Chapel, visible in those surveys, turned out to be post-medieval, on the east side of the road that approached the abbey in the eighteenth century.

Finds from Thomas's cuttings, and from later small digs, show that the early house was furnished more richly than timber buildings alone would suggest. A copper-alloy lion, about thirty-nine millimetres long, cast hollow by the lost-wax method, was made to fit a triangular space on a larger object. On style it belongs to the later eighth century. It was found with a copper-alloy rod, originally about 243 millimetres long, which fits a mould found a few metres away, so the rod was made on Iona.

Fragments of early medieval window glass show that some buildings had glazed windows. Moulds and a reticella rod show decorative glass-working. Copper-alloy pins, strap-fittings and other pieces of the ninth and tenth centuries show that people were still on the site, and still working metal, in the Norse period. A copper-alloy human head belongs to the twelfth century.

Together these objects are evidence that shrines and reliquaries of the kind described at Blathmac's death were not only imported. Some of that metalwork was made here. A Hiberno-Norse pin of the tenth or eleventh century, one of several found on the island in recent years, came from disturbed ground at Martyrs' Bay, with a coin of Charles the First, pottery and flint. Pits there looked like graves, but no human remains were identified.

The pin is evidence that the island still drew people after the raids of the late eighth and early ninth centuries.

The island was lived on long before Columba. Flints in and under the ploughsoil near the village hall belong to two periods: a late Mesolithic one, about seven thousand years ago, the earliest human activity yet known on Iona, when mobile groups may have used the island seasonally, and an early Neolithic one, about five to six thousand years ago. On the west side of the island a rubbish pit eroding from a sandy bank, full of limpet and whelk shells, sheep or goat bone, a piece that appears to be the shoulder blade of a grey seal, pottery, flint and cobble tools, was dated from birch charcoal to between 930 and 810 before the common era, the Late Bronze Age. Cut pieces of red deer antler were found nearby in earlier years.

At the south end, Iona marble was probably quarried in the Middle Ages, and the Duke of Argyll authorised work again in the late eighteenth century. The machinery still on the site belongs to the Iona Marble Company, which operated from 1907 to 1913.

What a visitor meets now is all of these layers at once. The vallum is the only upstanding trace of Columba's monastery. Tòrr an Aba is the little hill where his writing hut is said to have stood. The Street of the Dead, a medieval route, is still flanked by Saint Martin's Cross and the replica of Saint John's Cross.

The abbey church runs, in its fabric, from the thirteenth century to the sixteenth, and it is again a place of worship. The museum holds a collection of early medieval carved stones that is among the finest in Scotland. The cloister carries modern carvings of the island's birds, plants and animals, cut over many years by the Jedburgh sculptor Christopher Hall, who also carved the gravestone of John Smith. Smith, leader of the Labour Party, loved the island and was buried here in 1994.

The nunnery stands a short walk to the south. The Iona Community, formed in 1938, still keeps the old round of work, worship and teaching. The place changed the north of Britain by giving it a literate Christian centre, a mission that reached the Picts and, through Saint Aidan, Northumbria, a law for non-combatants, and a school of books and crosses. It was raided, relocated, rebuilt by the lords of the Isles, emptied at the Reformation, and raised again in the twentieth century.

The dates from the mound and the ditch now tie that first wooden house to the years when Saint Columba was alive.