We had bought a guidebook on the island, a rather indifferent and uninspired affair—though, after all, so much is legend and tradition, that it is difficult to be positive about anything. Even the little roofless chapel, down in the corner to the left, and dedicated to St. Oran, the oldest of the ruins, is probably eleventh century. That Saxon and pious queen, Margaret, wife of Malcolm Canmore, is believed to have had it built as one of her efforts to civilise the savages of her adopted country. She stuck hard to her thankless task, yet with such success that good Scottish historians to this day bless her name. And as far as these Highland parts are concerned, her reforms slowly but surely spread until their feudalistic groundwork blossomed in the flame-bright flower of the Clearances. She was a pious statesman, whose sad and onerous duty, to herself and to God, was to spread the light in that heathen darkness where, long centuries before her redeeming advent, a benighted successor to Columcille was writing: ‘At another time, while the blessed man was living in the Iouan Island (Iona), one day his holy face lighted up with a certain wondrous and joyous cheerfulness, and, lifting up his eyes to heaven, filled with incomparable joy, he was intensely gladdened.’ They believed in those far days that ‘when the heart is glad the face blooms’. Such simple and dogged cheerfulness must be a sad trial to any true reformer. But she did her best.

Yet perhaps the most astonishing thing about the burying-ground that lies before the chapel ruin (this ‘awful ground’, as Dr. Johnson called it) is that it contains the dust of forty-eight Scottish kings, the last of whom was Macbeth. Murdered Duncan was buried here, as Shakespeare, the incomparable, knew:

‘carried to Colm’s-kill,
The sacred store-house of his predecessors,
And guardian of their bones.’

Forty-eight Scottish kings buried in this tumbled graveyard—before the Norman conquest of England in 1066. And to-day should a man be bold enough to refer to the Scottish nation, he is looked upon as a bit of a crank, and his brothers smile for him, with diffident humour, in apology. St. Margaret of blessed memory worked better than she knew, and certainly her husband, Malcolm Canmore, broke the Iona tradition by being properly buried in Dunfermline.

As late as 1594, the Dean of the Isles describes three tombs, ‘formit like little Chapels’; Tumulus Regum Scotiae, Tumulus Begum Hiberniae, and Tumulus Regum Norwegiae. In the first ‘ther lay fortey-eight crowned Scotts Kings’. In the others, Irish and Norwegian kings. ‘Within this sanctuary also lye maist pairt of the Lords of the Isles, with their lynage, twa clan Leans, with their lynage, with sundrie uthers, inhabitants of the haill isles.’

There is little evidence of all this temporal glory to be seen now, though the two ridges—the Ridge of the Kings and the Ridge of the Chiefs—are clear enough, with the chiefs looking much more important than the kings. Altogether it is a small unimpressive place—to the mind looking for physical wonders.