Iona. Wendy figured we needed to leave by 9:00; it might take as much as an hour and half to get to Fionnphort for the 11:00 boat. We missed the 11:00 boat, we missed the 12:00 boat.  There’s only one decent road on the island and it’s not always even that. It runs along the Sound of Mull from Tobermory to Craignuir, then cuts across the inland hills and what they call mountains to follow Loch Scridain to Fionnphort. The well maintained back-road that the tourist office had told me about allowed us to skirt Tobermory and lulled us into thinking we had more time than we had.

At Fionnphort we were greeted by sheep in the car park.

A short walk got us to the ferry dock. The handsome ferries made me a wee bit homesick for Puget Sound. The gray, windy and cold day contributed to the visit to a moody, mystical place. Founded by St Columba who came over from Ireland in 563 C.E., the nunnery is in ruins and the Abbey is supported by scaffolding. Sue complained that every time she visits a place like Iona, she can’t get a decent picture without scaffolding.

Sound of Iona

A Christian ecumenical community, founded in 1838 by George MacLeod, is thriving today and, of course, a tourist business but neither blocks out the bleakness. If I thought Mull was remote, this little island is other-worldly in its loneliness. Or so it seemed to me. The short boat ride over on a ferry is quite a contrast to a small medieval boat in the wind and rain and cold, the nuns holding onto their wimples, their habits billowing about them.

George MacLeod said Iona was “a thin place where only tissue paper separates the material from the spiritual.”

Felix Mendelssohn, a visitor in 1829, said, “When in some future time I shall sit in a madly crowded assembly with music and dancing round me, and the wish arises to retire into the loneliest loneliness, I shall think of Iona.”

Those two quotations –displayed in the entrance to the abbey, gave me a frisson. I have read that many people get a sense of something otherworldly on Iona. That was my moment.

My other frisson was Shakespearean. Apparently, Macbeth and Duncan are buried in the abbey churchyard. As are about 60 other kings of Scotland. I go back to that small medieval boat with nuns’ habits billowing and add a royal corpse. And a cold, gray sky.

burial place of Macbeth

Iona Abbey minus scaffolding

Iona

Getting myself to a nunnery

My one-armed Mozart in the abbey, asking one of the disciples to cut his meat for him.