An extract from Hungry Heart Roaming – An Odyssey of Sorts:

The men running the little Calmac ferry from Fionnphort to Iona must
have one of the most boring jobs in one of the most beautiful places in
west Scotland – though the fast currents and rips in the sound can be
tricky. Ten minutes to the holy place, with a whiff of diesel and hot
engine. And back again. And again. And so on. But then, Charon must also
have got fed up with all those short journeys across the Styx, and been
irritated by all those passengers, shades, waiting for the next ferry to
another world, stretching out their hands imploringly in their desire
for the other shore. ‘Wait for the next boat!’ he calls grumpily, as he
fends them off with his oar. The ferry’s trips back and forth, all day,
across the little sound, end with the grinding of the ramp as it goes
down onto the concrete of the slades, and we go on board. In the
shallows’ clear water, unconcerned, sea anemones wave their florid
tentacles for passing food and urchins make their slow progress across
the rocks.  A canny otter is regularly seen waiting near where the
fishermen sometimes gut their fish.  Gulls glide by on stiff wings,
watchful. In season delicate terns shriek their harsh Norse name ‘kria’,
flutter, and dive for little fish. The air smells salt. To port we can
see the sunlight on the pretty bay where in 806 Viking raiders massacred
68 of the monks. This bright place too has seen the darkness. This has
been one of the fulchra of the world. It does not forget it. Maybe it
still is. Will be.

Rosanna Petra and I walked in silence from the ferry. So much had
already slipped into temporary irrelevance as we had moved north through
England and across the Borders from normality: first the immediate
pressures of work, of managing the day to day, then the traffic and
people thinned out, then came the big punctuation mark of the ferry
across the  sound from Mull. We left the car on the other shore: you do
not have the option not to distance yourself from the busy roads of the
world. If you want to, take it as symbol: surrender the need to be in
charge, the need to drive yourself.  Just two of us, silent, and the
dog, on that road many had trodden before us, though the modern road on
the island only in bits lies over the old pilgrim route from Martyrs’
Bay. But even so to walk that path imposes a silence on the mind.
‘Listen. Be still.’ Perhaps it is because we expect it to, from what we
have read. Perhaps there is another reason.

This is – always was – a place pared down to essentials. No enticing
luxury here, simply light, water, soil, sun: the essentials. It draws my
body as it draws my spirit.  It is another of those in-between, ‘thin’,
places – indeed, you can understand why it was of Iona that George
MacLeod first used that expression for places where the grace of God is
breaking through like sunlight suspected through clouds. Between the
tumultuous highway of the Atlantic and the wild solidity of Mull,
between then and now (for ‘then’ is never far away), between knowing and
unknowing… The Abbey church is far unlike the Celtic monastery that was
once here, which is now only imaginable in the deductions of the spade.

But some things are constants. It is late Autumn – I always seem to go
to Iona in Autumn, my own included – and there must be thought for the
welfare and fodder of people and beasts over the dark months. It was
always thus, for the neolithic people who lived here with their smaller
cattle, for the people of the Isles during those long centuries when the
failure of the fishing or a murrain on the cattle or hay that went sour
and mouldy meant starvation. The monks farmed this land, as people had
done for millennia before they came. You can’t – should not – separate
the work of the body from the work of the spirit. (St benedict says as
much in his Rule.) In a field by the rough road we walked on our way
back to our lodging, a man was cutting a last aftermath of hay – the
equinox fell on the next day – the last chance of storing a bite for the
beasts before spring, and you never know how much feed your animals will
need or how long you will need to keep them in from the winter’s
wildness.  Over the last week, every waking hour of sunshine all over
the islands farmers have been cutting, turning, baling. Yesterday, when
the hay had already been cut and baled, a young lad was driving his
tractor back and forth, dragging a drag harrow up and down, the sheep
scattering on either side of him as he drove. He was scarifying the sod
to encourage the new growth next spring.  He rarely slowed as he crossed
the field, swept a turn, straightened out, crossed again, confidently
avoiding the little rock outcrops that remind of the times before man
was.  A grave gaggle of greylag geese watch from a distance. Nice of him
to clear the grazing for us, for it has been a long flight south to our
wintering ground from Greenland and Iceland. Take away the machine, and
a scene, a job, as old as man as a farmer. A man at home in his
homeland.

Ranald, son of Somerled, Lord of the Isles, refounded the community as
Benedictine in the 1200s, and the church’s worked stones and arches
speak of France, of Rome, and remind of that argument lost at Whitby.
Ranald’s sister Beathag founded the Augustinian nunnery down the lane,
and was its first prioress. (I stood very early one windy Autumn morning
in the ruins of the hold of the Lords on the crannog at Fionnlaggan on
Islay. Beathag and Ranald must have known it. Hector the Labrador’s
silky black ears were flying in the wind, bright sun was bouncing off
the steep little waves in the loch. Brother and sister would have had
dogs too. The ruined chapel, as big as a large garage, contained two
unconcerned, ruminating, sheep, who sneered at me, as sheep do.) But in
Iona a curious eye can learn to see the memories the landscape holds,
and insistent ghosts of much of the early Christian land pluck quietly
at your mind’s sleeve. Notice us, they whisper.

We picked out – we had done our homework, of course – as we went along
several clues to the later Benedictine community’s buildings – they do
run roughly to a pattern, as Roman forts do. But the twelfth century
monastery was there for exactly the reason we were there, walking that
road: because Columba, centuries earlier, and what he did, had made this
a special place. What happened here changed Europe, slowly, like leaven
in the dough.

Copyright: Charles Moseley 2020

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