Iona Abbey
Iona Abbey on the small island of Iona off the southwest tip of Mull is one of the most sacred and historically important places in Scotland and in the story of Celtic Christianity across the British Isles. The island was chosen by St Columba in 563 as the site for his monastery following his exile from Ireland, and from this remote Hebridean community the mission that converted the pagan peoples of Scotland and much of northern England to Christianity was launched, making Iona the spiritual source of Christianity in large parts of Britain. The abbey that visitors see today dates primarily from the medieval period, but the island's sanctity rests on the fourteen centuries of religious life that preceded and surrounded its construction.
Columba's original monastic community of Irish monks established a tradition of scholarship, manuscript production and missionary activity from Iona that shaped the Christian culture of Dark Age Britain. The Book of Kells, one of the supreme masterpieces of Insular manuscript illumination, is believed to have been begun on Iona before the community fled Viking raids in the ninth century, taking the manuscript to safety in Ireland. The tradition of illuminated manuscript production established by Columba's community gave the world some of the greatest works of art of the early medieval period.
The medieval abbey church, rebuilt in the twelfth century and substantially restored in the twentieth century by the Iona Community, is the centrepiece of the monastic complex. The Street of the Dead, along which the bodies of kings were carried for burial on the island, and the Reilig Odhráin graveyard where forty-eight Scottish kings including Macbeth and Duncan are traditionally said to be buried, connect the abbey directly to the royal burial traditions of early medieval Scotland.
The ferry crossing from Fionnphort on Mull, a short but atmospheric passage across the Sound of Iona, is the final approach to one of the most profound sacred landscapes in the British Isles.