From Iona to Glastonbury

From Iona to Glastonbury

Holidays can begin in weariness. Yet everyday mundanities soon give way to tantalising glimpses of a different life.

The ferry left a misty Oban and arrived at the jetty on Iona where the weather had turned bright. Wild and remote, the villagers of this tiny island in the Atlantic Ocean know how to walk against the unbridled wind. Yet in what has been a curious summer of weather, the sun shone for longer than a day and our skin glowed. Freckles became uncountable.

We explored coves and caves for the very first time, dreamt of ancient legends that spoke of truth and possibility, walked across fertile flowered machair and were awoken at dawn by the rasping sound of grey and chestnut plumaged corncrakes, secretive summer visitors from Africa, who opened our eyes to the illusory rising of two suns.

The Bay at the Back of the Ocean, The Hill of the Angels and the Gully of Pat’s Cow, the Port of the Marten-Cat Cliff, the White Strand of the Monks and tide-dancing for tiny polished beads of serpentine at Columba’s Bay, beckoned us. Ragged robin, St. John’s Wort, bog myrtle and orchids grew in a landscape of translucence and light.

We stayed at a small island hotel. The bread-maker rose early in the morning to prepare her gift and the smell of earth’s fragrance wafted through the house. Fresh organic bread, rich and moist, full of seeds and nuts, carrying the gentle life and death secrets of grain.

The Abbey remains the summer-hour destination for coach weary day-trippers and those escaping the noise and grime of city streets and isolated urban spaces. They come to a remote island and feel at home. At sundown, the island gives itself back to resident dwellers while kittiwakes and sea eagles, like sentinels, soar around this thin place.

When St. Columba made his bittersweet landing on Iona’s shores, the story goes that he chose it because it was a place where he would not be able to see his beloved Ireland. He was drawn to a world beyond his knowing. His home-sickness must have been like the ache of an uprooted plant with only courage and faith to hold it up, until he became grounded in new earth.

And so on to the opalescent mist of Glastonbury, popularly known for its annual music festival of Vee Dub tents, welly boots, boho, wild flowers in the hair, mainlining acts and mud.

This is Camelot, the Isle of Avalon, a place of disappeared kingdoms, myth, intentional well-being and religious and New Age pilgrimage. Sitting amongst the ruins of Glastonbury Abbey, in the drizzle of a mild September day with the ‘once and future’ King Arthur and his wife, Guinevere, reputedly lying buried nearby and with centuries of fireside storytelling warming my imagination, I felt as though I was searching for the rainbow’s end.

Legend has it that Joseph of Arimathea, the great-uncle of Jesus, who placed his nephew’s body in the tomb after the Crucifixion, later made his way to Glastonbury with eleven companions, bringing with him the Holy Grail, the cup used at the Last Supper and which he used to catch the blood of Jesus at his death.

Glastonbury was once an island. It can be seen from a great distance because of the Tor, a hill of some 500 feet, crowned by the 14th century Chapel of St. Michael. Joseph is said to have buried the chalice near the Tor and to have founded the first Christian church in Europe at Glastonbury. Resting on Wearyall Hill, he stuck his staff into the ground where it miraculously took root. The Glastonbury Thorn blooms each Christmas.

Great saints over the centuries, Dunstan, Columba, David, Bridget, Patrick and others have made their pilgrimage to this place of sanctity as have so many of us ordinary mortals since, because not only did Joseph of Arimathea walk there but also Jesus himself. Perhaps.

The mystic, artist and writer, William Blake toyed with that possibility too when he penned the words of his poem, Milton, verses of which became known as the hymn, Jerusalem,

And did those feet in ancient time
Walk upon England’s mountains green?
And was the holy Lamb of God
On England’s pleasant pastures seen?

What really happened in this place of unravelled threads?

Richard Bach, author of Jonathan Livingston Seagull wrote, ‘not being known doesn’t stop the truth from being true.’ A rainbow coloured the Avalon sky in the late afternoon. I knew that I would never find its beginning nor its end. It matters not.

©Hilary Oxford Smith