Iona Abbey

In 563, the Irish nobleman-turned-monk Columba landed on Iona with twelve companions, having left Ireland — depending on which version of the story you credit — either as a missionary by choice or in penance after a dispute that ended in bloodshed. Whichever account is true, what he built on this small island off Scotland's west coast became one of the most consequential monasteries in the history of the British Isles.

From Iona, missionaries fanned out across northern Britain, carrying Christianity to territories that had never seen it before; the island earned its reputation as the effective birthplace of Scottish Christianity as a result. The community that grew up around Columba's original foundation also became a serious center of scholarship and craftsmanship — the Book of Kells, one of the most lavishly illustrated manuscripts to survive from the early medieval period, is thought to have been produced here before eventually making its way to Ireland, and several of the elaborately carved Celtic high crosses associated with the island were almost certainly carved by Iona's own monks.

That prominence made Iona a target once Viking raiders began working the Scottish coast. The worst recorded attack came in 806, when 68 monks were killed at what is still called Martyrs' Bay; the community eventually moved some of Columba's relics to safer ground at Dunkeld and Kells rather than risk further losses. The monastery visitors see standing on the site today is not Columba's original wooden foundation but a stone abbey raised in the thirteenth century, built directly over the ground where his first community had lived and worked six hundred years earlier.

Getting there

135 km from Coleraine. Tiree Airport (TRE) is about 35 km away.