When people set out specifically to think about what it means to be human, the Camino de Santiago often comes to mind. The medieval pilgrim route across northern Spain draws roughly half a million walkers a year. Iona is the quieter answer to the same question, and the one most travelers haven’t heard of.

A Small Island

Iona is a small island off the west coast of Scotland, three miles long and a mile and a half wide. A ten-minute ferry from the Isle of Mull gets you there. The rock under the island is called Lewisian gneiss, notable for being some of the oldest in Europe, roughly half the age of the Earth. Saint Columba landed here from Ireland in 563 to build a monastery. Pilgrims have been coming ever since.

The Celtic Christians had a phrase for places like Iona. They called them “thin places,” where the veil between worlds is thin. George MacLeod, who founded the modern Iona Community in 1938, said only a thin tissue separates the material from the spiritual on Iona. The phrase has spread far past its religious roots. Travelers who don’t consider themselves spiritual use the phrase after they’ve been.

What makes Iona thin is simpler than the language suggests. Cars aren’t allowed, and shops are minimal. The sea is on every side, and the abbey is the tallest building on the island. After a day or two, you start thinking about things you hadn’t had time for.

The English writer Samuel Johnson said something similar in 1773, when he and his friend James Boswell visited the abbey ruins on their tour of the Scottish islands. He wrote that a man was little to be envied “whose piety would not grow warmer among the ruins of Iona.”

A National Geographic Traveler writer made the trip earlier this year. Within two days, they had settled into the abbey’s rhythm: meals in the refectory and evening services in the candlelit church with the wind off the Atlantic rattling the windows. Iona’s rocky shore, they wrote, “still feels like a good place in which to grow wise.”

How to Go

Getting there is part of the experience. Train from Glasgow, ferry to Mull, bus across Mull, ferry to Iona.

Most visitors don’t stay. Of the 130,000 who come every year, the majority are day-trippers off bus tours from Oban or quick stops from cruise ships. They get two or three hours, see the abbey, walk to the harbor, and leave on the last ferry. They haven’t really been.

Two or three nights is the minimum, ideally more. There are a few small hotels (the St Columba and the Argyll), a bishop’s house, self-catering cottages, and B&Bs. The Iona Community runs week-long residential programs at the abbey, meals included, no faith required. Independent travel works just as well. You can walk the island end to end in an afternoon. After the day-trippers leave on the 4:30 ferry, you have it mostly to yourself.

Go in May or September if you can, and stay at least two nights.