Sea kayaking in St Columba’s wake

St Columba could raise the dead, turn water into wine and supposedly once battled the Loch Ness monster. But the miracle everyone remembers was his sea-journey — sailing from Ireland to Scotland in a tiny boat, in the sixth century AD. Precisely how tiny remains a matter of confusion.

Some pictures show a vessel the size of a bathtub — crammed in the back are a few seasick disciples, paddling frantically while Columba stands steadfast at the bow, reciting psalms into a blizzard of sea spray. In other depictions, Columba sails alone, cresting the summits of almighty waves in a cowhide coracle, not a lot bigger than a kitchen sink.

Columba and his companions settled on Iona — a small island off the western tip of the Isle of Mull, what must then have seemed the frontier of the known world, where the last shards of Eurasia stutter out into the Atlantic. Here, he founded a monastery in the image of Jerusalem. The monks farmed and fished, and copied the gospels by candlelight, and the saint sailed the Firth of Lorn and Loch Linnhe on his evangelising missions. Iona, the stories went, was a beacon of Celtic Christianity shining into the pagan darkness of mainland Britain. The druids held the glades and the glens — but news of Christ went by water.

Today various boats travel the waters off Iona. Luxury yachts swish past. A rusting ferry shunts between the island and the rest of the world (the service has been running since the days of Columba — once, people summoned it by setting bundles of heather alight). At dusk you can see the firefly trails of trawlers on the horizon. It might be a bit of a stretch, but of all these vessels, I’d like to think the modern successor to Columba’s coracle is my sea kayak: small, manoeuvrable, somewhat-silly and half-heroic, crewed by a single soul and at the mercy of a temperamental sea.

I’m not a complete novice sea kayaker, nor am I as brave as the Irish apostle. Which is why I’ve joined a guided trip with a tour operator called Wilderness Scotland, based on the Ross of Mull, the 17-mile-long peninsula that forms the southern part of the island. The Ross is a perfect place for sea kayaking. Beside the Sound of Iona it fractures into a series of islets, skerries and passages — only a boat of shallow draft can nose about its narrowest nooks. A sea kayak offers a passport to secret beaches, to picnics on harbourless islands where skylarks sing. Close your eyes briefly — ignore the Gore-Tex, neoprene and luminous plastic — and there is something ancient in the sound and feel of a paddle stirring a cold sea.

Our land base for the week is Achaban House, an old manse on the Ross owned by Matt Oliver and his partner Rachel: biologists from Aberdeen. Wildlife study here begins with glancing out the window. Otters sometimes splash about the loch at the end of the driveway. A cuckoo sings through the night in the hawthorn tree. The house stands alone on a hillock — when the couple moved in, the estate agent made cryptic remarks about getting along with the neighbours. Later, Matt parted the weeds to find the graves of former residents at the bottom of the garden. Also in the garden is a stone marking the last stage of the pilgrim’s way to the Sound of Iona.

Our first paddle takes us to Erraid: a tidal island (at low tide you can reach it by walking across a white sandy beach) which guards the southern approach to the sound. Our guide is veteran sea kayaker Andy Hall: he once kayaked from Cumbria to the Isle of Man in a single day. With a map, he gives us a lecture on the rush and retreat of Atlantic tides.

“Imagine the tides being like a pulse” he says, tracing a finger clockwise around Cape Wrath. “It travels all around Great Britain and ends up at the Wash.”

In a miniature way, we are entering the community of seafarers. Andy speaks the language of the sea — the neap tides and the wind-shadow, the fetch and the skeg. Flares, satellite phones and a spaghetti of ropes are stashed in the kayaks (which Andy calls the boats). Everything below your tummy button is a passenger, berthed in the fug of the hull. The ship’s galley is two chocolate bars stuffed in a cagoule pocket. Over a week of paddling I hone a captainly squint.

We cast off and before long, seals surface alongside, close enough to see water droplets beading from their whiskers. Gannets and cormorants watch from the rocks. Being in a kayak allows for close encounters with wildlife, but it also acquaints you with many selves of the sea. Close to the shore the water possesses a vitreous clarity — a magnifying glass to the scuttlings of crustaceans below. Out in the sound it darkens, and the tip of the paddle vanishes like a pen dipped in an inkwell. When we run aground we pole our way out like Venetian gondoliers, and when the wind catches our cagoules we become human sails, surging through the spittle of surf. The sea has many textures too. Pushing the paddle through kelp is like stirring a stew. Andy shows us a trick to keep ourselves upright in difficult conditions — dipping the flat of the paddle as if we are “buttering a slice of bread”.

We stop for lunch on Erraid beside a sturdy Victorian harbour, silent but for the clicking of stonechats. It was used during the construction of the Dubh Artach lighthouse, 15 miles offshore: an 1871 newspaper report described this as “a scene of industry such as was nowhere else to be witnessed at that moment throughout the British Isles”. Erraid was also used as the shore station for the older Skerryvore lighthouse, 29 miles away. Both lighthouses rise from small rock islets, their teetering, top-heavy profiles recall the saint in his craft.

Both towers were built from Ross of Mull granite by the Stevenson dynasty of lighthouse builders — one of whom, Robert Louis Stevenson, used Erraid as one of the settings for Kidnapped. The story of the lighthouses’ construction was as mad and magnificent as a novel. At Skerryvore a temporary barracks was swept clean away by a furious sea. At Dubh Artach workmen hid in an iron box during storms, as a foreman’s fiddle reeled to the drum roll and cymbal crash of the waves. Later came legends of lighthouse keepers who went insane and tried to swim to dry land, and stories of great bombing waves so high they surged over the lights themselves (the keepers swore with hands on the bible this was true). Both lighthouses are now automated — places for circuit boards not human beings. No one really visits them.

Except Richard Booth, a fellow member of our kayaking group. He made a detour to Dubh Artach on a dive trip a few years ago. While Andy provides commentary on the seascape, Richard, a veteran diver, offers a commentary on the fathoms below us, having previously explored wrecks the lighthouses could not save. At one point we paddle over the Ostende — a cargo ship presumed to have been hit by torpedo in 1943, and diverted to a Hebridean bay where its cargo of munitions exploded. Chunks of the ship still turn up on dry land. The saddest, Richard says, is the DS Nyland, a Norwegian ship which fled the Nazi invasion, then smashed on to rocks with the loss of all souls in 1940. Richard dived there and saw a ceramic toilet bowl at the bottom of the sea. “I thought to myself — someone sat on that once,” he says. “It made it feel personal.”

Being in a kayak allows for close encounters with wildlife — but it also acquaints you with many selves of the sea

Our own shipwreck takes place on a windy Tuesday when one of the group is thrust on to a rock and capsizes. She shimmies on to a boulder, marooned under steep cliffs. We tow her empty kayak to a beach and launch a landward rescue on a promontory where no paths go — thrashing through the ferns, scrambling down gullies. After 45 minutes of shouting we find her; she seems fine, only a bit shaken. Once you’ve capsized you look at the sea differently, she says, and chooses not to go paddling the next day.

Twice on the trip I hear a local saying: “The sea is forgiving, but the rocks have no mercy.”

Sad stories continue to travel along the Sound of Iona. Three summers back an empty sea kayak was found floating adrift here, and a body the next morning. Conversations with locals often arrive at the tragic story of five Iona young men whose dinghy capsized on their way back from the pub one night in 1998. Four never made it to shore: an absence still deeply felt on an island of 150 or so souls.

At its narrowest point the Sound is little over 500m wide — often it is serene, mirror-still, draped in gossamer mists. But the water moves fast, and ever since Columba founded his Atlantic Jerusalem on the far shore the Sound has had an undertow of symbolism. Cross-currents of heaven and earth, joy and grief travel the strait. The day we are supposed to paddle across, the waves become wild and wind-shorn, so we pay the ferryman the return fare of £3.70 to take us across the threshold.

Iona is still an island apart: the tip of Ross of Mull is mostly pink granite, Iona has streaked Lewisian gneiss. It is more fertile, more farmed, and busier with tourists. There are gift shops selling Highland cattle fridge magnets. But there are also pockets of the solitude Celtic monks understood brought them closer to God. I climb a boggy hill in the north of the island: to my back is a white ocean, before me views stretch to Mull, Great Britain, the start of Europe. Perhaps to the monks there was value in being at the western edge of Creation: like standing back to better appreciate a canvas on a gallery wall.

In 597AD Columba died on the altar of his monastery; according to reports of the faithful, a pillar of fire blazed in the sky, and a storm stopped the ferry for three days. His legacy endures; the turf, daub and wattle hut where he slept on a bed of stone later became a Benedictine abbey. That abbey is now home to the Iona Community: an ecumenical Christian movement campaigning on matters of social justice, climate change and nuclear disarmament.

“Celtic Christianity can be romanticised and put up in a mystical cloud,” says Catriona Robertson, warden of Iona Abbey. “But Columba was earthly: he cared for nature, he walked into the sea every day to sing psalms. We want people who come here to also be alive to creation: to see the stars, to hear the birds — like the swallows and the corncrakes which have just arrived.”

Catriona says many who come to Iona can still be described as pilgrims.

“We’re not on the way to anywhere: people come here because they want to. That intention is important. People make an effort. An outer journey — a bus, a boat — reflects an inner journey too.”

I’m about to leave to catch a return ferry to Mull when I hear music in a room off the abbey cloister. I open a door to find someone playing folk songs on an upright piano, next to a symbolic replica of Columba’s coracle. The information board beside the boat suggests we “think of a coracle as a fragile island of peace and security on the waves in a troubled world. Islands offer safety, limits, edges, refuge and solitude but a coracle also has a purpose . . . a movement . . . ” Without stopping for applause, the pianist segues into “Wild Mountain Thyme”. Some say the traditional air is Irish, others insist it’s Scottish. Perhaps it belongs to the seas in between.

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