The Isle of Iona and its ruined Nunnery - a beautiful ruin dating from the 13th century

While visiting some of the Scottish islands a few weeks back, we made a trip to the Isle of Iona, including seeing its ruined nunnery.

Iona was quite a religious island back in the day, and I posted about the abbey that was built on the island last week. A nunnery was also built on the island sometime around the 13th century, that operated alongside the abbey/monstery.

The nunnery is very much a ruin now, but enough of it remains to give a good understanding of the size.

From the remains it can be seen that there was some really nice stone work on the building, and I love how there is a mixture of rose coloured stones built into the walls alongside the more common grey/brown boulders. I do wonder if the red stone represents where the walls were repaired at some point in time as the build method does seem different compared to the lower stone work which is very straight and uniform.

The building certainly had some pretty nice features including lovely stone arches throughout.

Iona is quite a lovely island, and although inhabited, it does not have a huge population. In the pic above you can see a good proportion of the houses down on the shoreline. Wikipedia states the population as only 177 !

One of the things thats quite nice about being on some of the islands is the lovely clear blue waters they have around them - which can be clearly see in the pic above. The colour is quite mesmerising.

While we were there we saw the air ambulance. There is no hospital on Iona, and when there are any medical emergencies, a helicopter has to get used to fly the patients off the island.

Above is a picture of the abbey, the main attraction on the island which I covered in another post last week (here).

Above is one of the stone carved crosses that Iona is famous for. This was down the road from the abbey. A plaque beside it said that this is/was one of the stopping points for people who were on a pilgrimage to Iona Abbey. When making their way across the island to the Abbey they would stop here to prey.

And above is the Iona war memorial, which also has the design of an Iona stone cross. This is from World War one and the sad thing to see is how many names are on it, from such a small island. This would have represented a significant part of the male population on the island at the time, as there were names on the other sides too. What a shame.

And how cool was this boat that we saw down on the shore ! A pretty unimaginative name though !

We really did love our trip to Iona. Its such a beautiful island, and quite impressive to see. Well worth this visit if you are ever in these parts !