Culture in Columba’s Day
The surviving field remains and excavation findings give us an idea of what Columba’s foundation looked like. A rectilinear vallum with rounded corners defined a legal and symbolic boundary, within which would lie the buildings described by Adomnán – the church with an attached chamber, working or sleeping huts for the monks, Columba’s sleeping hut and a work cell ‘built on a higher place’ where he studied and prayed, guest accommodation and a communal building probably containing a kitchen and refectory. There were also zoned areas with workshops.
Detail from the Book of Kells (Courtesy of The Board of Trinity College Dublin)
The archaeological evidence gives a picture of a bustling, busy community of men and some women, worshipping, working farm land with barley and oats on the machair on the west shore, with a mixed livestock economy, predominantly dairy (butter and cheese). Deer, cattle, pigs, sheep, seals and fish were well represented on the menu. There were moulds and a crucible for metalworking: the raw materials for glass-working for beads or millefiori were found; there was a wood-turning workshop near the south ditch, and a leather-working workshop nearby. The community was also creating high status items such as (in all likelihood) the Book of Kells, and possibly the Book of Durrow. We should remember that the Book of Kells itself used the hides of 60 white cattle, a luxury product, its ink colours created by skilful mixing of the local plant dyes; and that the Iona High Crosses were produced in the 7th century by master carvers. As relics of Columba became available and greatly sought after, there was an explosion of techniques in the manufacture of reliquaries, crosses, adding to the creative energies of the community.
Site of Columba’s work cell, identified in 2019 in front of the modern Abbey buildings Photo: David Paton-Williams
At the same time, the monastic routine was established. Columba himself ring-fenced his solitary time and space with his work cell on the Tòrr an Aba, as discovered in the Glasgow University excavations in 2018/9. Dallán’s Amra Choluimb Chille, the elegy on Columba written within a year or so of his death, sets him firmly within the widest literary and cultural traditions of Western Christianity. Work comparing different translations of the Psalms is an example of his active critical scholarship; and we haave a book possibly annotated by his own hand where phrases are highlighted when they differ from alternative Latin texts.
The library on Iona was remarkable a its range and richness. There still survive the lecture notes of some poor student on a lecture by Adomnán on Vergil, for example. This was a Latin speaking, scholarly and library-rich community, on the geographic margins of Europe, but in the cultural mainstream.
The 8th century St Martin's Cross, Iona Abbey Photo: NickGibson3900, via Wikimedia Commons
Exploring Further
Clancy, T.O. and Márkus, G., 1995 Iona: the earliest poetry of a Celtic monastery (Edinburgh)
Fisher, I., 2001 Early medieval sculpture in the West Highlands and Islands (Edinburgh)
S.M. Foster, Picts, Gaels and Scots: early historic Scotland (Batsford 2014)
G. and A. Henderson, The art of the Picts: sculpture and metalwork in early medieval Scotland (Thames and Hudson 2004)
G. and A. Ritchie, Scotland: archaeology and early history (Edinburgh University Press 1991)