Excerpt from Behold Iona: A Guide and Souvenir Isle of Dreams, Isle of Saints. And Isle of the Sculptors, the last from its pre-eminence as the home of masons cunning in the working of stone. Its ancient Gaelic name signifies that the Island was a centre of Druid worship long before the birth of Christ and the coming of Columba. For as long, then, as man has known of this little place it has spoken to him of the things of the spirit. To tell the story of Iona, wrote Fiona Macleod, is to go back to God and to end in God. It was under the inuence of Columba that the glory and renown of Iona blossomed into full ower. It developed into the most famous centre of Celtic Christianity, the mother community of numerous monastic houses whence missionaries were despatched for the conversion of Scotland and Northern England, and to which for centuries students ocked from all parts of the North. After St.

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