May the Joy of Christmas overwhelm you, beautiful souls! We are all on Iona for this Nativity Feast and it may be impossible for us to record anything new this Christmas (our wooden shepherd's hut Chapel on Iona has no acoustics at all), but we shall still sing our hearts out and we shall keep all of you in our prayers. Please remember us in yours. https://mullmonastery.com/donation/ | Mull Monastery of All Celtic Saints

Iona is the monastic centre of the Scottish Isles. St Columba, St Oran, St Kenneth, St Aidan and hundreds of others have called it Home. Some of these saints are celebrated in our calendar, others are only known to God. Some have died far away from this holy place, others were martyred on its beaches. We spend two days on Iona during our Pilgrimages - one in the village, the other walking to St Columba's Bay - trying to see what their eyes have seen, and to feel what their hearts have felt. We c

Iona, the great Columban monastery off Scotland’s west coast, was struck repeatedly in the early Viking Age: a raid is recorded in 795, the monastery was burned in 802, and an attack in 806 killed 68 members of the community. Those shocks became foundational trauma in monastic memory—but they did not simply end Iona overnight. Evidence and scholarship stress continuity: Iona remained active, even after further violence in 825, while the wider Columban “family” reorganized in response to danger a