The rain seemed to be getting heavier, if that were possible, and we sheltered for a little in the lee of the cairn. In many ways it was a typical West Coast day, with lands and islands vaguely looming and disappearing in the mists. Being properly clad, the rain could not wet us nor the long grasses get over our boots. And this in itself provided a pleasant freedom. The rain, too, kept all folk indoors, so that we saw no human being. We saw the isle itself, and in its coloured fields and soft air, in its sheep grazing here and there and its cattle, we saw also, perhaps more clearly than if the day had been fine, that it was a delectable isle. How wisely Columcille had chosen his ground!

For I feel sure, despite the legends, that this was no case of Columba’s having just happened to land here—as early European navigators happened to land on a West Indian island. Iona was an important centre in that early Druidic world. The usual scholar’s or historian’s talk about the savages and barbarians who inhabited the land in Columba’s time is very misleading. In this respect the Christian ethic certainly prejudged the Druidic truth. We do know, for example, that one king, Fergus, went to Iona for his coronation; and in that same isle he was buried, a generation before Columba landed. We learn, too, that the isle had a great number of standing stones, and late travellers talk of the existence of a Druidic temple of twelve stones, each with a human body buried beneath it. These wise early missionaries of Christianity did not believe in violence and destruction. They sprinkled the pagan monoliths with holy water and carved on them their Christian emblems. As one French writer put it: ‘They baptised these idols in order that they might continue to be adored.’ That was in Armorica; for the practice was general, and in Scotland to this day we find great menhirs with a Cross on one side and the Pagan emblems on the other.

The Synod of Argyll pursued the contrary method, and in 1560 A.D. decided that the 360 sculptured stone crosses of Iona were ‘monuments of idolatrie’ and were therefore to be cast into the sea. Possibly this Protestant Synod did more to destroy the accumulated spiritual riches of Iona than all the Viking ravages put together. But some of the stones were rescued and carried to the mainland, while it is possible that at least two of them may still be found on Iona itself.

But out of much undisciplined reading about that ancient pre-Christian world, what has always struck me is the extremely wide, if not universal, practice of what may be loosely called the standing-stone or Druidic religion. Even the attempt over many centuries to make of Europe one unified country of Catholic culture and religion, seems a small affair when set against the actual Druidic unification of that older world existing over a period of time so great that we hardly dare to compute it.