Isle of Iona and Isle of Mull

We’re just back from a last weekend of travelling in Scotland, and we chose to visit the Isle of Iona, which is just about as different a place as can be from Paris, where we were last week. On Friday, we drove across the country to the western port city of Oban. We had a quick lunch at the pier (David and I had a plate of mussels and some scallops, but since the fisherman at the stand was bringing in crabs and lobster as fast as they could cook them behind the counter, the kids were enthralled and disgusted, and neither of them would eat a thing. We drove our car onto the ferry for the crossing to the Isle of Mull, which took about 45 minutes. Mull is one of the bigger islands in the Hebrides on the western side of Scotland, and a popular tourist destination, especially in the summer. The whole island has a population of only about 2,500 people, but tourists probably outnumber residents 3 to 1 in some months of the year. When we arrived on the island, though, we drove straight across the southern part, towards the very small port city of Fionnphort, to take another ferry to the even smaller Isle of Iona. The drive across took over an hour and was mostly on single-track road with various passing places marked along the way with tall black and white striped posts. It was a lovely drive, after David sorted out the proper protocol of wait-or-go-for-it when we met an oncoming car on the single-track road! In Fionnphort, we gathered a small collection of some of our suitcases and left our car, then boarded an even smaller ferry to Iona. At this point, the sun was just starting to disappear, and a proper Scottish fog was coming in off the ocean, so our view of the blue ocean and the mountainous islands in the distance was just beginning to disappear.

Iona is a very, very small island (population 125!) that is most well-known as the spot where St. Columba landed from Ireland in 563 to start a monastery, which later became the center of the British monastic system and played a role in the conversion to Christianity of the Picts and the Anglo-Saxons. It’s also one of the spots where Celtic crosses (the tall stone crosses with a ring around the intersection to hold up the heavy arms) were first sculpted, and the island still contains several of them today, including St. Martin’s Cross from the ninth century. The Iona Abbey is still standing as well, which was built in 1204, though it has undergone lots of restoration through the years. There’s also a convent, in ruins, that was built in 1208 for Benedictine nuns. Other than that, the island has two hotels, one road, one tavern, a one-room primary school, and the smallest post office I have ever seen. Since it’s Scotland, there’s also a golf course on the island, though it’s really just a huge plateau of machair with some tin cans sunk into flat patches every few hundred yards, and the grounds crew consists entirely of sheep. To say that the island is peaceful is a gross understatement…and that’s even after we had arrived!

When we walked off the ferry, the fog was quite thick, so even though the island is small it took us a while to get our bearings. We were staying at a hostel on the very northern end of the island, and though the only decision we had to make upon arrival to figure out how to get to the hostel was to turn either left or right on the only road, we were still a little worried that we were headed in the wrong direction since we couldn’t see anything. We walked along the road (really a gravel path the width of a golf cart path) for about a mile, watched intently by a flock of sheep and a few cows who probably hadn’t seen that much traffic in quite some time. When the road ended, we still weren’t sure we were in the right place, until Emma saw a small outbuilding behind the only croft around and pointed us in the right direction. As we walked towards the building, a man came to meet us and confirmed that we were in the right place after all, which was a great relief after almost an entire day of travel. He showed us around and we settled

in and made dinner. The hostel was also home for the night to two Americans, each travelling as singles, and an English couple. The two Americans were quite chatty and were trying to engage the English couple in a conversation with little luck. One of them was completing a masters’ degree online, so their conversation centered on the benefits of an online education (no boring professor yammering at you from the front of the room for hours!). The other one was from Upstate New York (I overheard…) so I was hoping to avoid a conversation with either of them, but wasn’t that fortunate. I got away with only answering their rapid-fire questions for about five minutes (the Upstater asked, when we told him that we had brought a group of American college students over to St. Andrews for the term, if it was, “like, a Montessori-type program?” and the online-degreer asked John what the hardest thing about playing football was…so that gives you a sense of how that went). After we ate, the fog had lifted a bit, so David took the kids to the beach (our hostel was on a tip of land on the northernmost part of the island, so surrounded by gorgeous sandy beaches!) while I went back to the room with a glass of wine and a book to calm my nerves!

The following morning, the fog was gone and the sun was out, so we got to appreciate the beauty of Iona to its fullest. We ate a quick breakfast then we back to the beach, and the kids set up a “jewelry-making shop” on a flat rock—they would pound pointy shells with a small rock until the very tip of the shell wore away, then would string them all together on a piece of black seaweed to make necklaces and bracelets. When they tired of that, they started climbing the huge sand dunes, then launching themselves off the very top to fall into the sand below. They actually convinced me to try it a few times, and though I realized when I got up to the top that it was WAY too high for them to have been doing that kind of thing, I admit that it was also really fun, so I reluctantly told them that we couldn’t jump from that high any longer (but only after jumping four or five times myself…) We walked back down the “road” around lunchtime and had something to eat at the bar in town (fish and chips for David and a ploughman’s lunch for me), which has a big concrete terrace overlooking the pier and Mull in the distance. Then we continued down the road to the southern part of the island. We wanted to make it to Columba’s Bay to see where he landed from Ireland, but once the “road” stopped it looked pretty difficult to navigate our way across the rocks, so we turned around and headed back. We stopped at the Iona community gift shop and a few art galleries on the way, and got the kids a book about St. Columba and another about the Highland clearances. Then we went back to the beach and let the kids play for a few more hours while we read. The previous guests of the hostel had checked out and a new party arrived—this one a large group who were celebrating the completion, earlier that day, of one of their party’s having climbed the Ben More on the Isle of Mull, which is a munro (a hill over 3,000 feet), and marked his having climbed all 283 munros in Scotland—a feat that was five years in the making. They arrived with a case of wine and two cases of Foster’s, so we decided to give them their space and stay on the beach until the sun went down (which is at about 10:00 pm these days!).

On Sunday, we checked out of the hostel and visited the Iona Abbey. We arrived just after a service began, so wandered around the grounds and the cloisters until it was over. I think David would have liked to attend the service, but the kids would have found that (or made that, actually!) difficult, so we settled for touring the abbey ourselves. Then we caught the ferry back to Fionnphort and reloaded our stuff back into our car, then began the drive to the northern part of Mull, where we planned to stay for two nights in the fishing village of Tobermory. We stopped just outside Fionnphort at a tavern for some lunch (the kids had nachos, David had the roast lamb dinner, and I had a collection of tomatoes and beans that was called “chili” on the menu but which had not yet met up with any kind of spice…) then continued our drive up the western coast of the island. The distance between Fionnphort and Tobermory was about 50 miles, but the roads are so narrow and windy, and one has to pull over repeatedly onto the tiny passing places jutting out over the cliffs for oncoming traffic, so it took us about 3 hours to get there. While we drove, I was amazed at the size of the island and how much of it was vast, undeveloped land. I suppose that the low population density of the islands is still related to the Highland Clearances following the Jacobite uprising in the 18^th century, combined with the lack of infrastructure (no electricity lines or sewer systems here…), but it’s still surprising to see that much dramatic, gorgeous coastline with nary a soul around!

By the time we arrived in Tobermory, the clouds had returned and it was starting to drizzle. We were a bit early to check into the hostel (one of the many brightly colored buildings along the often-photographed port of Tobermory) so we wandered a bit among the shops, and stopped in at the co-operative grocery store for some dinner. When we finally arrived at the hostel, we learned that there was a bit of a misunderstanding with our reservation (long, long story here, from which I will spare you…) which was to result in our staying together in a private room for the first night, but in single-sex dormitories the second night. We actually had to fight for the private room for the first night, and David had to sort of “steal” it back for us from a large group of French tourists who arrived just a hair behind us. None of us were too happy at this, so we glumly dropped our bags and headed to the kitchen to make dinner. The French tourists were

there as well, and I did manage to engage in a five-minute conversation with them in French (causing John to whisper to me at one point, “Where are we again?”). After we ate, we had only enough energy to make it up the three flights of stairs to our rooms, where we all read until we fell asleep. I had trouble sleeping—worrying about the hostel situation the next night, theworsening rain, the laundry I would have to do upon my return, unanswered Colgate emails, packing to return to the States, the card I needed to write to the head teacher at Greyfriars, where my charm bracelet was, did John have enough socks for the rest of the trip…you know how that goes! At about four in the morning, I gave up and turned on a light to read, and by the time morning came around, I had decided to call it quits on the last part of the trip. We had planned a trip to the beach, a castle and a hike up Ben More the next day, but I just didn’t have any of it in me, and wanted to go back to St. Andrews instead to enjoy one more day together in the house before heading home to New York. When everyone else woke up, they agreed with me, so I called the ferry company to move

our trip up by one day and we got out of the hostel as soon as possible. We did drive to Calgary Bay on the way to the ferry, and took a very short walk around the sandy beach, and were still in Craignure where the ferry arrived with an hour or so to spare…time for yet another tavern lunch (venison burger for me and filled rolls for everyone else) before the ferry left. We arrived back on the mainland in Oban at four, and after a quick stop at a Waterstone’s and the bathroom, we began the three hour trip back to St. Andrews, with one planned stop in Dundee for a last meal at Emma’s favorite Indian restaurant. Needless to say, we were all thrilled to be back to the St. Andrews house that night, instead of dormitory rooms in rainy Mull!