The Accidental Pilgrim

Iona Abbey

Around the island of angels

In a new three-parter, we tag along with Tom Davies on a wayward and knockabout pilgrimage through the holy places of Scotland, Ireland and Wales. This week's landfall is on the island of Iona, on Scotland's west coast, where St Columba lived in the 6th century.

FROM A DISTANCE, Iona really did look like something from the pages of myth: shell beaches whiter than the whitest detergent, grey crofts dotted around the harbour, stone crosses and cairns, the ruins of the nunnery and the object of my pilgrimage; the great abbey itself where white doves fluttered around the slate roof.

Even as we crossed the causeway on the ferry out of Fionnphort, with the sun blazing down and a foaming trail of spume in our wake, I knew I would fall in love with the place; knew I would leave a bit of myself behind me on those white sandy shores. Emotions soar and plummet on a journey like this, but, on that short ferry ride, I stood there bursting with soaring gratitude that I could make a living of sorts doing this.

The sea all around heaved with belches of brilliance. I had been told that Scottish painters had been obsessed by that Hebridean play of light on water; by the dark greens and purples of the sea bed and that amazing white sand. In all this we could see the colours of holiness again – in the tumbling waves on an isolated shore; in the calls of birds in a wing-flashed sky. I looked up and, suitably enough, saw that the trails of two jets had emblazoned a huge fluffy white cross across the roof of the blue sky.

THE NEXT MORNING we all gathered next to the stone cross of St John for a pilgrimage around the island. A very strange gang of pilgrims it was too: around 60 Germans in their Bavarian hats and lederhosen, some greying elders of the Church of Scotland in their walking boots and about 20 kids from Glasgow over for a holiday in the abbey's community centre: dirty wee sparrows with bruises all over their thin white legs, ill-fitting T-shirts streaked with stains and thick brown coatings of nicotine on their fingers. They had no leather bags or binoculars. They had what they stood up in.

'This is not a race,' said our leader. 'It's walking together, talking together and sharing the island together. This stone cross has been here since 1200. Please shut all gates behind you. Leave no litter. Only those over 75 can drop out.'

We made our way up a rubbled stone track, tiptoeing around cow pats and across fields drowsy with daisies. Tiny hanks of sheep's wool hung on the barbed wire fences. Even with flies dive-bombing all around, everyone was cheerful and chattery as the Glasgow kids each took it in turns to dump a fat girl on her backside. But she always seemed able to bounce straight back up, waving her beefy arms around and smiling in a way that suggested she thought this was a lot of fun.

'Ah, zis is lousewourt,' said a German lady falling on her knees and shoving her nose right up against a tiny blue flower. 'You see. It is insect-eating. Vunderbar.'

Later we squelched our way down a ravine that was half bog and half rock until we came to an old marble quarry, its machinery eaten away by rust since its closure in 1914. We were asked to take a piece of marble and sing a hymn.

BOSWELL THOUGHT Iona was a fertile island; Sir Walter Scott found it desolate and unbearable. But, just walking over these dung-dotted slopes, you could see this island of barely 3000 acres was barely generous with itself.

The tiny reservoir was hardly enough for the island's population of 80 in the winter – let alone in the summer when this number went up fortyfold – and even then the brown water looked like whisky. The soil was thin and sandy, whipped by centuries of salt winds. For weeks during winter the wind blows with such destructive violence some abbey workers move around with large rocks in their pockets to stop themselves being blown over. Even the huge stone cross of St John has been blown down twice.

But today the sun had got its hat on and we all streamed over the golf course to St Columba's Bay. The waves were collapsing and wheezing into the shingle; a group of brown cows sat at one end of the beach like a small picnic party of fat, horned day-trippers. It was here, in 563, that Columba and his twelve disciples finally landed after a battle in Ireland where 3,000 had been killed. He came, he said, determined to convert as many to Christ as had died in that battle, and the cairn next to the beach marked the spot where Columba's beloved Ireland finally vanished from view. 'It became the cairn that turned its back on Ireland,' said our guide. I picked up a shell and listened to the anguished howling inside it.

A mini-van from the abbey came bumping across the field and we all queued for our lunch: a plastic cup of tea from a silver urn, a package of spam sandwiches and an apple. I have always hated spam and apples but was so hungry I all but ate the wrapping as well. We threw our apple stumps out for the sheep.

I spent a happy half an hour talking with Tom, an East End social worker who had come here with his wife for a break since he had a serious chest complaint. He told me a bull had loose on the island the day before with everyone diving and leaping over the hedgerows. Even poorly Tom had got over a fence like he was Superman. 'The only time I want to see a bull is inside a hamburger,' he added with a shiver.

LATER WE TROOPED across more fields and came to a ruined hermit's cell where the monks used to come to be silent with God. The guide asked us to be silent for three minutes and we sat around the rubble listening to the sounds as the monks would have heard them: to the skylark who seemed to have been busy whistling his brains out all day long; to the conversation between wave and shingle; to the thin beleaguered cries of the sheep and the wind quivering in the grass. To the medieval mind all such sounds had meaning.

By late afternoon many of the pilgrims had fallen away as we toiled up the final – and highest – hill on the island. There was a wonderful view of the Inner Hebrides; of the rugged outline of Jura where Orwell wrote 'Nineteen Eighty-Four'; of the innumerable caves of Staffa, including Fingal's Cave, immortalized by Mendelssohn; of the wild, torn slopes of Skye with her whisky stills... all dotted over the glittering blue waters like great grey battleships moving in for battle.

By now our faces were as pink as prawns from being out all day in the sun. We were quite tired too; not much chatter was left in us. Only the Glaswegian children were still leaping around as if they had just got up, though the fat girl, clearly fed up with her role as the group's ball, had gone missing. A few of us went off to a nearby well in which, according to pagan rite, if you washed your face, you could stay young forever, before tumbling down the iris-spattered slope and back to the abbey for a shower and snooze before dinner.

THE NIGHT BELLS sounded in the glimmer din – as they charmingly call twilight here – and, dinner over, we crowded into the church for a healing service. Healing, in the traditions of Columba, is central to the abbey's work. There is a monthly intercession, whereby people can write asking for prayers for someone. Lists of names are then sent to 130 intercessors scattered over the country and the sick are all then prayed for on a regular basis.

But tonight was to be a laying on of hands service. 'We see this as the very work of the church,' said the speaker. 'We do this because we have been commanded to do this. Mark said that believers will put their hands on the sick and they will be healed. Touch shows sympathy and empathy. It shows Christ's love and compassion for every person.'

A group of people filed up to the altar with the rest of the congregation coming up from behind, all placing their hands on one another and their sick brothers and sisters. 'Lord, they whom thou lovest are sick.' It was a tender moment in the flickering half-light, some ministering to others in faith. It was somehow healing that so many Germans were with us too and, not for the first or last time on the island, I felt close to Columba, the great healer himself.

NEXT WEEK: The toughest pilgrimage in the world – Tom walks in St Patrick's Purgatory on Lough Derg.

This serialization is taken from the new edition of Tom Davies's book, 'Wild Skies and Celtic Paths', published by Triangle, October 1998, £6.99. To order your copy online, click here.

Tom Davies has worked as a seaman in the merchant navy, as a social worker in New York's Lower East Side, and as a Fleet Street journalist. Now a freelance writer living in Penarth in Wales, he is the author of 13 books, including 'The Man of Lawlessness', 'Landscapes of Glory' and 'The Celtic Heart'. His latest travel book, following the old pilgrim route to Santiago de Compostela, 'The Road to the Stars', will be published in January 1999 by Triangle.

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