For an island so small, Iona’s influence on history has been enormous. For centuries, when most transportation was by water, it lay in the center of Gaelic political, cultural and religious life. When a monk named Colum Cille arrived by boat in AD 563 from Ireland, bringing Christianity for the first time to Scotland, he walked onto land which had been settled and periodically cultivated since 4000 BC. St. Columba, as he came to be known, died in AD 597, and the monastery he founded on Iona continued as a major center of the earliest Celtic Christian church.
Through the next 250 years, monks kept historical records, wrote and illuminated poems, prayers and scriptures, and carved great, Celtic crosses of stone.  Three of these crosses, the Pagan circle of earth and sun surrounding the Christian cross of redemption, are sheltered today in the small Abbey museum.

 

The Book of Kells, an illuminated manuscript of the four Gospels, was very likely created on Iona in the 8th century, not long before Vikings sailed into the Iona Sound, raiding and destroying the buildings and killing 68 monks. This book was saved, but the religious community did not survive.
In the 13th century, Benedictines built a large, stone monastery, followed by a nunnery, renewing the religious presence on the island. But by the end of the 17th century, the Protestant Reformation had weakened it to the extent that when the Earl of Argyll landed a regiment on Mull and seized ownership of Iona, there was little protest. The remaining Benedictines gradually
moved away or died.

 

Over the years, nature and local residents needing building materials seriously eroded the monastery and nunnery buildings; but such was its size, beauty and solidity, the monastery was eventually restored. It is known now as the Abbey, and is the impressive complex of buildings at the heart of Iona.