Why Iona in the Inner Hebrides is the ultimate modern pilgrimage

People seeking a spiritual escape often instinctively make for far-flung places: to the ashrams of India, the ayahuasca retreats of the Amazon or the mossy gardens of the Balinese hills. But the British Isles also has its own deep history of spiritual retreats; of early Christian saints who withdrew to windswept places along the Atlantic shore. These solitary wanderers installed themselves on storm-lashed islands, kept company with breaking waves and squawking seabirds and sought their own private wildernesses — for it was here, they believed, their prayers would most clearly be heard.

Foremost among them was Iona, a rocky, near-treeless landmass in the Inner Hebrides that served as a first foothold of Christianity in early medieval Britain. Monks here followed a mystical, nature-focused faith, under the guidance of Saint Columba, who’d famously braved the fury of the Atlantic sailing to Iona from his native Ireland in an improbably tiny coracle. Today (for all but a few people), getting to Scotland’s holy island demands travellers make a long, challenging journey by road, rail and ferry. In effect, it demands a pilgrimage for those who seek to step on its shores.

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My own begins by catching a morning West Highland Line train from Glasgow Queen Street Station, the carriages trundling among bracken-swathed glens and snow-dusted munros. From the port of Oban, an afternoon ferry clanks across Loch Linnhe, pitching across chilly fathoms and passing under the gaze of blinking lighthouses. From the port of Craignure, on the Isle of Mull, an evening bus travels a solitary single-track road westward over sullen moorlands, the headlamps catching the eyes of deer herds out in the dusk. Two days after first setting out, I embark on the final leg, a second, smaller ferry over the swells of the Sound of Iona — which is when the holy island finally comes into view.

Iona is small: three miles long and one mile wide, with fewer than 200 permanent inhabitants. Standing on the shore are a row of modest cottages, souvenir shops and hotels for high-season guests. The tallest building on the island is, in fact, the oldest: Iona Abbey, a descendant of the one that Saint Columba founded in the year 563. Now, as it was then, it’s a place people come for contemplation, its remoteness enabling pilgrims to separate themselves from the world, to reflect on life’s roads travelled and those miles yet to come. “An island can help remove distractions,” explains the Reverend Ian Dewar, a regular volunteer at the Iona Community. “You need times of being busy in your life and times of stepping back. A bit like the movement of the tides.”

Established in 1938, the Iona Community is an ecumenical Christian organisation that now occupies the medieval abbey. People of any faith, uncertain faith or, indeed, none at all can join retreats centred on practical tasks, with discussions often rooted in progressive politics. Joining one such programme, I soon find time falls into an easy rhythm. By day, I’m assigned to a team clearing weeds and planting strawberries; in the evening there are hearty meals in the refectory and candlelit services in the medieval abbey (where the Hebridean wind rattles the glass and the congregation wears bobble hats to guard against the cold). Each night, I sleep in a room overlooking the medieval cloisters, waking to find gulls perched on the slates outside my window. This abbey had a seismic impact on British history, acting as a base for missionaries to Christianise Scotland. Yet today it’s free of pretence and hierarchy, imposing no creed or ritual — a place of easy conversation and comfortable silence.

Much time here is spent wandering trails walked by pilgrims for millennia. One blustery evening I head to St Columba’s Bay, a pebbly cove in a southern nook of the island that’s supposedly the place where the saint first came ashore in his coracle. I go for a bracing dip in the Bay at the Back of the Ocean — a vast, crescent-shaped beach strafed by North Atlantic gales — mindful that Columba and other Celtic saints were known to practise cold-water swimming as a means to focus their mind and test their resolve.

But for me, the most resonant place on Iona is the Hermit’s Cell, a ruined circle of stones, half hidden in a fold of hills at the island’s heart. Here, folklore says Saint Columba sometimes retreated to be apart from his followers and pray in a place of solitude. It makes for a beautiful hermitage, enclosed by tussocky grasses and sheltered by low crags, with a far-reaching view to the Atlantic.

Followers of Celtic Christianity supposedly believed in ‘two books’ — the first being the Bible; the second being all creation, in whose natural rhythms and finer details you might also discern the Almighty’s will. And even for secular pilgrims who come to Iona, there are lessons to be carried back on the return ferry: in the profound peace of the sandy beaches, the sanctuary of Iona Abbey and the society of its residents. And the presence of the great, writhing ocean that was once the limit of the known world, whose rocky edge still feels like a good place in which to grow wise.