St Columba and Iona had a habit of appearing in my life before my historical research on the subject. As a child I would visit the Highland Village at Iona, Cape Breton. When selecting my confirmation name, I chose St Columba because of my family’s connection to Scotland. Now that I research the place and the history of the medieval monastery, references to Iona and its founding saint, which I had been oblivious to before, now seem to have populated the landscape that surrounded me for far longer than I could imagine. The Scottish diaspora to Canada clearly has touched the very landscape of what is a young country. Now me and my family seek out these link-points. One summer we hiked to the St Columba falls in Victoria County Cape Breton.
Now it is a week until I travel to the island for the first time. I have been preparing for this journey for close to a year now, and with a week left before I set off, it will be a curious experience to link all these places, names and landscapes back to the foundation that started it all. I’ve been told repeatedly that ‘you will feel the magic of the place when you arrive’. Perhaps part of my delay in making this journey has been a reticence that such ‘magic’ or ‘feeling’ could blur my own refracted view of Iona: a refracted view that I think is valuable in its own way. Yet then how could I ever claim to understand a place that I had never seen with my own eyes? How could I ever understand a community without seeing and experiencing the landscape and seascape that they lived, and thought and wrote in?
The beginning of ‘The View from Iona’ project starts from these concerns.
In this last week before my journey takes place I will likely produce some more preparatory blogs leading up to the start of the journey itself (highlighting my plans and equipment and such). Please stay tuned to this blog and follow me on social media to get updates and see extra content.
An Eye on the Sail 