Iona's Namescape: Place-Names and their Dynamics in Iona and its Environs

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Iona, although a small island off the larger island of Mull, off the west coast of Scotland, has one of the oldest, richest, and most complex place-name records in Britain and Ireland. It also has a complex modern landscape as a result of multiple user-groups interacting with the landscape of the past in different ways. This project interrogates the dynamics of the namescape (the historical and changing landscape of names) of Iona and its environs, shedding light on the past, and proposing new ways of curating place-names as part of heritage management.The 'Life of Saint Columba' written around AD 700 by Adomnán, the ninth abbot of the monastery of Iona, gives our earliest detailed impressions of this landscape, including some of our earliest recorded Gaelic place-names in Britain or Ireland. In the modern period the island became a destination for tourists and antiquarians, who interacted simultaneously with older texts and traditions and with the landscape and monuments they found, creating, curating and reinvigorating names. In the past century a traditional Gaelic crofting community has evolved into a more mixed economy, with a greater range of year-round occupations, augmented by seasonal auxiliary staff and faith-tourists. Permanent organisations, e.g., the National Trust for Scotland and Historic Environment Scotland now have differing management responsibilities towards the built and natural environments of the island, joining the international faith group, the Iona Community. This has created a complex dynamic of new names, translated names, and forgotten names, in Gaelic and English, a contested landscape of heritage and naming. These place-names (settlement names, landscape and coastal features, monuments) have never been subjected to formal rigorous analysis, despite the fragility of many of the names used by the Gaelic-speaking community in recent times. That fragility (highlighted by recent deaths) makes it vital that we subject this namescape to a programme of rigorous research, publication, curation and dissemination to the public and to official public bodies, and that we do it now. The team we have assembled for this purpose represents cumulative and long-standing expertise on Iona's history and heritage, on place-names and place-name survey, and on Gaelic and history in the adjacent island of Mull. In assembling this team at this time, the project is of utmost timeliness.The core tasks of the project will be to research in-depth the place-names of Iona, to make that research widely available to the public through an online resource, and to bring them to publication in a volume of the Survey of Scottish Place-Names. Because of its long-standing links to Iona, this will also include the place-names of the nearby small uninhabited island of Staffa, also managed by NTS. The research will involve an in-depth investigation of the earliest records of Iona and its landscape, as well as work with modern recordings of Gaelic place-names, and new fieldwork into contemporary usage among the various communities who inhabit and work on Iona. The research will be set against the context of the neighbouring island of Mull, examining how Iona may share features with or differ from its environs. Our work on the concerns of curating heritage place-names will be explored in an international conference on 'Authority and Authenticity', with subsequent essay collection.We will engage fully with a variety of beneficiaries from the project, producing a number of key ancillary outputs designed for the public and for the aid of heritage management: an interactive website allowing exploration of the names and the landscape; a popular guide to the place-names; standardised lists of names. We will further engage with the public and with heritage management bodies via a variety of events, including workshops, and a conference in 2021, the 1500th anniversary of the traditional date of the birth of Iona's founder, St Columba