Return from Iona

The days on Iona are past for another year. The light was out of sheerest paradise for the near week we were there: that light is precious when it comes as late in the year as this - often October can be stern with wind and driving rain. I was unable to visit some of the coves I have come to love so dearly in the south of the island: places like The Gully of Pat's Cow and the Port of the Young Lad's Rock. Often these little nooks to the south are treasure chests: pieces of Iona serpentine will lie here undiscovered for months and even years. I even have a tiny polished fragment of amber that was given to me in childhood days by someone who found it on one of these shingle strands. It's for this reason I wrote my book 'Iona, the other island. I and my photographer Iain Sarjeant shared the vision of telling folk the hidden stories of Iona. We knew all too well all the other books about the Abbey and Nunnery and village: but we knew too that almost invariably the rest of the island is forgotten. So we wanted to tell these stories through images and words.

www.kennethsteven.co.uk

INTRODUCTORY

I'm here on the Isle of Iona in the Scottish Hebrides on the last day of the annual writing course I have led for many years now. We have been blessed with the most perfect of days in mid-October: hard to believe it is this late in the year. It feels appropriate too to be writing a first blog in this place that has meant so much all through my life; the place indeed where I learned to walk as a baby!