All this land, however, was under an ‘influence’. We could feel it without being quite able to explain it. Perhaps the cloud over Iona had a little to do with it, and perhaps it is possible that ages of pilgrimage do communicate something even to inert matter. Anyway, we were always aware that Iona was at hand and that in some fashion it drew life towards it.

Along the road an occasional bus could be seen with its load of passengers to Fionnphort, where the ferry is. For thirteen hundred years pilgrims had gone that way.

‘We are now treading’, says Dr. Johnson, in his celebrated passage on Iona, ‘that illustrious isle which was once the luminary of the Caledonian regions, whence savage clans and roving barbarians derived the benefits of knowledge and the blessings of religion.’

But Columba, who knew all the corners of his Caledonia, put the emphasis differently on that last day of his life when he climbed the little hill overlooking his mill and his granary and the enclosure with the simple round cells encircling the little church (what ear can catch the tread of his footsteps?), and blessed what he looked upon, saying: ‘Unto this place, small and mean though it be, great homage shall yet be paid, not only by the kings and people of the Scots, but by the rulers of barbarous and distant nations with their people.’

Is it possible that the learned doctor would have been moved at the thought that he was perhaps fulfilling the prophecy better than he knew?

So the Mate and I set out on foot one day along the road, not as pilgrims but because we were told there were shops in Fionnphort and it was not much farther away from our boat than Bunessan. It was easy and lightsome going that road with the sun on our backs and a bracken switch for the clegs. It is an up and down road, too, with pleasant birch glades and unexpected turns. When we had gone a long way we came on an old man cutting hay in a field whose tall drystone dyke was built of red granite boulders, so we asked him if it was far to Fionnphort, and he told us, after laying down his scythe, that it was all of two miles.

‘You haven’t much of a hay crop?’

‘No,’ he said sadly. ‘The deer tramped it down.’

‘Do they jump these walls?’

‘Oh yes—easy that.’

‘Why don’t you shoot them?’

‘It’s not my hay. I’m just working here. . . . Besides, it would get me the jail.’

He looked sad and worn and a little stupid, as if centuries of overlordship had drained the spirit out of him.

‘Who owns all the land?’

He gaped as if he had not heard aright. Then he muttered something about ‘The Duke’, and breathing ‘Aye, aye’, by way of salutation and farewell, returned slowly and sadly to his work.

The benefits of knowledge and the blessings of religion. Aye, aye. But O for a touch of the roving barbarian and the clan savage that Columba knew!