Like my medieval predecessors, the journey to Iona for me was
very much a pilgrimage, and included the classic elements of a devotional
exploration. I cast off family attachments (or at least made sure they were
settled in the chocolate café in Tobermory), carried out a long journey facing
many adversaries (primarily getting past the lunatics who holiday in Mull in
mobile homes the size of buses) and finally reached Fionnport to catch the
ferry. Here I stepped away from my final connection to the real world (or “parked
the car” as some might term it) and joined the small group of hardy visitors
waiting in the driving rain for the Calmac ferry.
At this point, it’s worth emphasising that my visit to the
island was not as long as I could have hoped for; the shocking weather and the
need to preserve familial harmony meant that I was only able to spend a few
hours on Iona so this account is by necessity impressionistic rather than
thorough.
Although my interests are primarily early medieval, I was
surprised to be seduced by later medieval archaeology of the island. Although
heavily reconstructed, the abbey church was wonderful with some vibrant and
quirky historiated capitals. I also fell in love with the intimate little
cloister, an antidote to the larger cloisters I’ve experienced in Durham and
the great Cistercian monasteries of the Yorkshire. Smaller monastic houses such
as Iona would have been much more typical of the vast majority of medieval
monasteries in Britain, and certainly similar in scale to Lindisfarne Priory.
I was also smitten with the later medieval tradition of
carved stone working – the continued use of interlace on recumbent grave slabs
and some crosses, such as the still-standing Maclean’s Cross and the more fragmentary
15th century cross of Lachlan MacKinnon with its plant scroll with
its echoes of Northumbrian vine-scroll carving of a far earlier period. There
was also an impressive later tradition of figural representation on burial
monuments, seen on the effigies of the abbots in the church and the
bullet-headed knightly effigies originally from Reilig Odhráin, which reminded
me of the confrontational knights of the Lewis Chessmen. There was also the
regularly appearance of the birlinn (sailed galley) motif, a potent reminder of
the importance of control the seaways in this region. My personal favourite
though was the memorial slab of the redoubtable looking Prioress Anna MacLean
in her pleated cassock.
Having a chance to look at the earlier carved stone was also
instructive, particularly getting the sense of scale of the high crosses. It
was also exciting to get a sense of the wide range of different stone types
being used for carved monuments, many not coming from the island itself. This
is strategic use of stone types is something that Adrian Maldonado has
commented on and also keys in to something we are starting to recognise in
Northumbria. However, it was looking at the wider landscape that I found most
instructive and for sake of brevity I want to focus on two particular aspects
of this.
The first issue is the impressive earthwork vallum that
surrounds the monastic core. In the literature this is one of the most distinctive
features of Iona. On the plans and aerial photographs that are the most usual
ways of encountering the plan of the site, it comprises a large well-defined earthwork
that runs along the western side of the site as a bank and ditch and can also
be seen as a cropmark to the north. Yet, when you are actually on the site, it
is very hard to discern this boundary, primarily because for the observer
within the monastery it is largely hidden from view by a series of rocky
outcrops, Cnoc nan Cárnan that run parallel with the western side of the vallum,
as well as two enclosures Cill mo Neachdain and Gill mo Gobhannan. Whilst the
latter two features are of uncertain date and may not have impeded an early
medieval view of the ditch and bank, Cnoc nan Cárnan certainly would have. In
many ways it is this rocky outcrop that serves to define and I think
significantly, constrain, the views from the monastery rather than the actual
vallum. It means that Iona is a site which like Lindisfarne looks towards its
shoreline, and like Lindisfarne, this nearest shoreline is not a wild ocean
vista but the more constrained landward view.
I also remain puzzled about the origin of the vallum. Whilst
long thought to be early medieval, more recently it has been dated to the Iron
Age by a C14 date of 40BC to AD220 from a sample taken from under the bank. As
Adrian Maldonado has noted, we do need to exercise a little caution here –
technically this only provides a tpq for the construction of the vallum rather
than a construction date itself. However, if for sake of argument we accept an
Iron Age date for this large bank and ditched enclosure then this for me raises
as many questions as it answers. My biggest qualm is that this large enclosed
area looks so very different from most common types of enclosures we know are
used in Argyll and the Inner Hebrides in this period, where the most common
settlement type is the far smaller dun. A good example is Dùn Cùl Bhuirg that
lies on the western side of the island which only encloses an area c.45m x 35m.
Crucially, both duns and the larger Iron Age forts tend to utilise hills and
defend the summit. The situation is very different at Iona where the boundary
seems to enclose a relatively low-lying rather than elevated area. I admit to
not being an expert on Iron Age enclosures in Argyll, but if we accept that the
vallum is Iron Age in date, we are faced with a new problem, a seemingly
a-typical and rather large enclosure preceding the establishment of the
monastery. It is surprising that despite the large number of interventions
within the enclosure, none have produced any clear Iron Age material culture
(apart from a glass bead that could equally be early medieval and a fragment of
Roman samian), whereas the relatively small-scale excavation by the Ritchies at
Dùn Cùl Bhuirg produced midden material, decorated Hebridean wares and some
beads. So, in essence, what is this
putative Iron Age enclosure?
My second area for consideration focuses on the relationship
between Iona and Lindisfarne in landscape terms. It is generally accepted that
Oswald’s decision to construct a monastery on Holy Island must have been
influenced by his experience of Iona during his time in exile in Dal Ríata
where he converted to Christianity. It is axiomatic that the planning of
monastic sites was in some ways at attempt to reconstruct on earth an idealised
model of Jerusalem, It is no coincidence that Adomnán, one of Iona’s most
important abbots, was the author of De locis sanctis (Concerning sacred places), a description
of the holy places of Palestine, including Jerusalem and Bethlehem. However,
exploring Iona also got me to thinking about the way in which Lindisfarne was
an analogue for Iona. In many ways the geography of the two islands is very different;
Iona is far rockier and has greater relief than the generally low lying
Lindisfarne. The latter is also, of course, tidally accessible rather than a
true island like Iona. Yet, there are some really interesting parallels both in
terms of physical geography and planning.
My first observation on this front
brings me back to my earlier comment about the use of a range of stone types.
One of the most distinctive features of Fionnport, Iona and the Ross of Mull is
its very highly visible pink granite; Lindisfarne, whilst not having pink
granite, does have outcrops of pin-red sandstone in the area around the site of
the early medieval monastery, something that would not have gone unnoticed by
visitors to the two islands.
Despite the difference in relief between
the two islands, Lindisfarne is not entirely flat and the distinct jagged ridge
of whinsill basalt that runs across the south of the island is an important
part of the landscape. In particular, part of this crag, known as The Heugh,
lies immediately adjacent to the site of the early medieval monastery. Visiting
Iona I was impressed by the similarity in terms of positioning between The
Heugh and the slightly smaller but nonetheless imposing Tòr an Aba which lies
to the west of the abbey at Iona. This latter feature was traditionally
associated with the cell of Columba described by Adomnán as ‘built in a higher
place’. Excavation revealed a stone footing and a cross-base created partially
out of re-used millstone. This reminds me of the presence of a cross-base lying
on The Heugh which also lies on an artificially created platform. More recently,
this summer, archaeological excavation on The Heugh also uncovered possible
early medieval structures elsewhere along the ridge. The geological parallels between the Heugh
and Tòr nan Aba, as well as the use of crosses to mark them are at the least
intriguing.
A
final interesting similarity is the presence (or former presence at least) of a
lake on both islands – Holy Island lough lies in the north-east corner of the
island, whilst the site of the Lochan Mór lies to the north-west of Iona Abbey,
although it had been drained by the 1750s. It had once had an outlet which ran
through the monastic enclosure via the stream known as Sruth a'
Mhuilinn, which as the name suggests may
have powered a mill, although this is not certain. Intriguingly, a lack of
pollen of from Holy Island Lough dating to before the late 7th
century has led to suggestions that it was created or at least expanded at some time in the early years of the monastery
on Lindisfarne. Whilst the most obvious explanation of this is the deliberate
harnessing and consolidation of a water supply to power a mill, the expansion
of a lake in the near vicinity to the monastery on Holy Island would have served
to emphasize some of the similarities in the landscapes of Iona and
Lindisfarne.
Obviously, the presence of particular coloured stones, the rocky
outcrops and open water on both islands are co-incidental. Yet in an early medieval
ecclesiastical mind-set primed to recognise analogies, similarities such as
these are unlikely to have been seen as fortuitous, and may instead have had
symbolic resonances. In a world where books, carving and landscapes were all
read analogously, as well as literally, these correspondences would have been
important. The parallel placement of crosses on The Heugh and the Tòr nan Aba
suggest a conscious decision to emphasise these similarities, as less certainly
does the expansion of Holy Island Lough. There is certainly scope for more
exploration of the parallels and differences between Holy Island and Iona in terms
of spatial organisation, but that is perhaps for a more extended piece of work.
I need to go back to Iona- there is still a lot of pondering
to be done. I never got a chance to explore significantly beyond the monastic
enclosure, I’m interested in the relationship between the island and both the
sea and the mainland. My time on Mull and in some of the surrounding areas
convinces me more than ever of the need of a proper hinterland survey of both
Iona and Lindisfarne; whilst both sites are islands, they were not isolated and
there is a real need to better understand their immediate and wider landscape
contexts. So, with a small prayer to Columba and Cuthbert, I hope to be back
soon.
