I'M all for the work of the Iona Community ("Iona plea for £500,000 so pilgrims can still progress", The Herald, July 2), but there is one flaw in the history of Iona which I've been challenging for more than 10 years and about which nobody wants to know. Little did I know, 40-odd years ago, when I auditioned (successfully) at Lord MacLeod's home in Edinburgh for a small part in the new musical play Columba, that I would later take such an interest in the subject.
Columba did not go to "the tiny Isle of Iona" in 563 AD. He went to what is now called Fort Augustus, then called Achinbady, which Adomnan Latinised to Hinba. In his second book, De Lociis Sanctis, Adomnan explains that the term "Insula Iona" was one used (as slang) by "the brethren" for whom he wrote the Life of Columba, and that it just means "Mother House." Thus, some of his stories are from when the Mother House was in Fort Augustus and some are from when it was in the Isle of Iona. That is why every single one of the so-called "lost place-names of Iona" can be found around Fort Augustus. That is why the Valliscaulians were so desperate to acquire the site in 1230 (just after they'd built another priory, virtually round the corner in Beauly) and that is why the Benedictines were so desperate to get it in the late 19th century.
In assessing the content of Adomnan's Life of Columba every historian has made the same mistake. The Latin word "insula" does indeed mean "island", but only if the author was a native Latin speaker. Adomnan was not a native Latin speaker, but an Irish Gael, and the word he would have translated into Latin as "insula" was "innis", which can also mean a water meadow or inch. The original Iona was thus built on the inch at Fort Augustus, which reverted to the name of Hinba when, after about five years, Columba moved his headquarters to the Isle of Iona.
George F Campbell,
26 Bruce Road, Pollokshields, Glasgow.
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