Iona’s archetype? A concrete replica of the Cross of St John speaks

The Isle of Iona, located off the south-western coast of Mull in the Inner Hebrides, has been described by the poet Robert Crawford (b. 1959) as a place where ‘spirit, imagination, and physical exertion mingle’. Iona’s assemblage of early medieval carved stones and grave slabs constitute a special part of the island’s magic, forming a collection of early medieval art for which there are few parallels in the rest of Europe. The importance of one cross in particular – the 8th-century Cross of St John – has only recently been realised, in part because of a study of its concrete replica, as Current Archaeology's Chris Catling reveals.

This article is from Current Archaeology issue 378

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The Isle of Iona is one of the most atmospheric and authentic early Christian sites in western Europe. It was here that St Columba (AD 521-597) founded a monastery in AD 563 that served as the base for a growing network of religious settlements that spread Christian culture across Pictland and as far to the south-east as the island of Lindisfarne. That early monastery suffered repeated Viking raids, starting c.AD 794, and most of the monks moved back to the monastery at Kells in Ireland in AD 804, taking the relics of St Columba with them, along with the renowned Book of Kells which had been partially completed by that date in the island’s scriptorium. Even so, a monastic presence continued on Iona, which became the burial place of choice for early medieval clan chiefs and several later medieval monarchs, including Duncan I (d. 1040) and Macbeth (d. 1057).

An aerial photograph of Iona’s main settlement (‘The Village’) taken in 1977, showing a tour boat at the landing pier and the path up to the Nunnery, where the road takes a right-angled turn to head northwards up to the abbey. PHOTO: Crown copyright: Historic Environment Scotland.

In 1203, the abbey was refounded as a Benedictine institution by Reginald MacDonald, Lord of the Isles, only to fall into decline at the Reformation. Consolidation of the surviving ruins began in 1899. By 1905, the chancel had been reroofed and a grand opening service was held on 14 July of that year; by 1913, the nave had also been reroofed and restored, and a service marking the completion was held on 17 July 1913. Iona Abbey’s new lease of life as a Christian community began in earnest in 1938, when George MacLeod founded the Iona Community as a response to the poverty he had witnessed as minister to a dockland parish in Govan, Glasgow, and to the growing threat of war.

A map of Iona identifying the key sites mentioned in the text. IMAGE: Artwork: Christina Unwin; photographic details: Sally Foster.

Describing Iona as a ‘thin place where only tissue paper separates the material from the spiritual’, MacLeod took a group of unemployed ship-workers and trainee clergy to Iona to rebuild the domestic and residential buildings of the former Benedictine abbey. Since then, Iona’s rebuilt monastic buildings have served as a place of retreat and reflection, and the focal point for the dispersed ecumenical Community whose core values include social justice, pacificism, and environmental stewardship.

Ian G Lindsay, the architect who advised the Iona Community on the restoration of the monastic buildings, drew this summary of the abbey’s three main phases: the surviving medieval fabric (green), the abbey church restoration of 1902-1910 (yellow), and his own work of 1938 and 1964 (pink). IMAGE: courtesy of Historic Environment Scotland (Iona Cathedral Trustees Collection).

Crossing paths with St Columba

For a place of such significance, understanding of the island’s early medieval archaeology was astonishingly poor until quite recently. Early guidebooks assured visitors that very little remained on the island of the original Columban settlement or its 13th-century successor. Fresh insights began to emerge, however, once Historic Scotland (now Historic Environment Scotland, or HES) assumed guardianship responsibility for the abbey and associated monuments in 1999, leading to a review of the archive of the late Charles Thomas (1928-2016), whose campaign of excavation, aimed at recovering ‘as much as possible of the material remains of the monastic house founded in AD 563 by Columba’ was carried out between 1956 and 1963.

Ewan Campbell (University of Glasgow) and Adrián Maldonado (National Museum of Scotland) recently published the results of that review in The Antiquaries Journal (Vol.100, 2020) and concluded that, despite extensive damage to the archaeological deposits caused by ploughing, excavation, and later building and drainage works, half of the early medieval deposits have survived undisturbed. In particular, earthwork banks and buried ditches survive from a series of monastic enclosures. Fresh fieldwork and geophysical survey were undertaken in 2010, revealing that what Thomas thought was single vallum (enclosing ditch) in fact consisted of a complex series of multiple enclosures, formed by the gradual enlargement of the area around the monastic buildings, defining a space that functioned as a place of holiness and sanctuary.