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Updated: June 8, 2025
Columba crossed over from Ireland to north Britain, with the wonted twelve companions. He established himself in the island of Hii, the Iouan island, now called Iona. In 565 he went to the mainland, crossed the central ridge of mountains, and made his way to the residence of the king of the northern Picts, near "the long lake of the river Ness," not far from Inverness.
Second prize, Iona Judd, receiving 300. Lillian Brown gets 15 for 1st prize. None awarded." There was a very feeble applause, and then silence for a second, and then the sun-bonnets rushed together, rushed away to others, rushed back; and talk swept like hail through the place. Yes, that is what they had done.
Calling together his monks, he bade them pray for a north wind, which came accordingly, and blew Cormac safe back to Iona, to tempt the waves no more. "Let the reader therefore perpend how great and what manner of man this same blessed personage was, who, having so great prophetic knowledge, could command, by invoking the name of Christ, the winds and ocean."
The town of Oban, on the mainland of Scotland, is generally made the point of departure for Iona, which is not far off. Oban is one of the five Ayr burghs which, combined, send a member to Parliament, and it was singular that, at this time, there was a bye-election going on.
The Hierarchy of the northern half-kingdom still exercised a protectorate, over Iona itself, for we read, in the year 1203, how Kellagh, having erected a monastery in the middle of Iona, in despite of the religious, that the Bishops of Derry and Raphoe, with the Abbots of Armagh and Derry and numbers of the Clergy of the North of Ireland, passed over to Iona, pulled down the unauthorized monastery, and assisted at the election of a new Abbot.
Want of facility in preaching in the Anglo-Saxon tongue was at first an obstacle, but it was speedily overcome, for king Oswald himself, who knew both Gaelic and English, came forward and acted as interpreter. When St. Aidan died in 651, Iona sent St. Finan, another Irish bishop, to succeed him.
So, about the next island of Iona, sang Columba himself twelve hundred years before. And so might I have sung of Earraid. And all the while I was aware that this life of sea-bathing and sun-burning was for me but a holiday.
Here he and his companions built with their own hands their parent-house, and from this Hebridean rock in after times was shaped the destinies, spiritual and temporal, of many tribes and kingdoms. The growth of Iona was as the growth of the grain of mustard seed mentioned in the Gospel, even during the life of its founder.
It is a wild, lonely, picturesque coast, and the Pacific moans along it, casting itself on it in heavy surges, with a singularly dreary sound. There are some very fine specimens of the phenomena called "blow-holes" on the shore, not like the "spouting cave" at Iona, however. We spent a long time in watching the action of one, though not the finest.
I wounded Loing Seac with a sword, the monarch of Ireland round." Two years later Saint Adamnan died, after governing the Abbey of Iona for six and twenty years. It was said of him that "He made a slave of himself to his virtues," and his great life-work, the Latin history of Saint Colum of the Churches, founder of the Iona Abbey, to this day testifies to his high learning and wisdom.
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