ISLE OF GHOSTS

Evening Star, Issue 19197, 13 March 1926, Page 23

ISLE OF GHOSTS

lona, the green and grassy island of the Inner Hebrides, where the Dowager Duchess of Argyll was recently buried, is an isle of ghosts. It is holy ground. FiftyAhreo kings are buried there— Kings of Scotland, Norway, France, and Ireland. It was here on this lone strip of moor and beach, lying at tho foot of the Ross of Mull, that St. Columba landed in 5G3 and founded the monastery, the ruins of which bear his name to this day. That monastery was destined to become the heart and centre of Celtic Christianity and place of pilgrimage to which people came by long and painful ways from all over Europe —coming that they might die on its holy ground Their hones are everywhere. Kings and princes, chieftains of great Highland clans, southron barons, and merchants of Old London—they all came to this lone island of tho western seas to die. It is their ghosts who haunt lona to-day—their ghosts and the wraiths of the monks who were slain when the Norse sea rovers sailed up the Sound of lona, landed at Buile Mor, and sacked tho holy places. That is why no man of lona will, even today, walk of nights by the Reilig Diran (“the burial place of kings”), as the cemetery of St. Odhrain is named in the Gaelic. Sit round the peat fire of nights and listen to Celidn, and you will hear why these spirits are restless. It is because of the dark work done in the-days of the Reformation, when 300 of the sacred crosses of lona wore torn off the graves of the dead and cast into the sea. Then, too, there are the ghostly marks of a man’s giant ribs left in the sands when the tide goes out—signs certain of the days when St. Columba fasted so greatly that the resting place of his emaciated body was imprinted in a stone for all time. Fingal, too, that raightly chief and hunter, and his hound, Bran, are others of the ghostly ones who haunt still this lone island outpost of the kingdom of Argyll ■ —for this is Campbell country and “the duke ” is king—king to such good purpose that, like another Scottish duke, he could and would, raise an army of clansmen who ' would put the love of Clan Campbell before all other earthly love. _ The dowager duchess will rest thus in soil made holy not only by writ and word, and by the clan love of her own people.