If you learn to listen, this wild isle gives up secrets—including some of your own.
Sacred Journeys: Revelations on Rona
By Rev. Paul John Roach
There is something dreamlike about islands. Even though you may recall specific details of your visit, after you leave a sense of unreality descends that suggests that maybe you weren’t really there after all.
Outwardly, the near-deserted island of Rona in the Scottish Hebrides, where my wife Wendy and spent a week a few years ago, is very real. Its rugged bulk comes from some of the oldest and hardest rocks on Earth—Lewisian gneiss, which approaches an age of three billion years.
What isn’t rock on Rona is bog and scrub forest. There are no roads, so you really feel the slog over the hill on the gravel path from the main harbor to the sole guest house, which sits on a cove known as Dry Harbor. If you stray from the gravel onto the few paths through the bog and moorland grasses, your boots quickly waterlog. Yet for all its physicality, Rona has that dreamlike quality, a mistiness, an unpredictability, that makes you question what is real and what is not.
Our stay was part of a six-week summer journey through Scotland. We wanted remote and possibly uninhabited, and Rona pretty much filled the bill. The six-mile long by two-mile wide island is a forty-five-minute boat ride northeast from the town of Portree on the Isle of Skye. There are no ferries, so transportation arrangements have to be made in advance. So does grocery shopping, so the night before we left we went to the only supermarket in Portree for provisions. Everything had to be packed in, although we were told that the island’s custodian would sell us some island-produced venison and fish if we wanted.
We boarded the boat the next morning with several bags of supplies and undeniable excitement. As we passed the giant hills of Skye, with sheep precariously positioned like white dots on the enormous cones of scree falling to the water, several rainbows arched over us auspiciously.
We arrived on Rona to the friendly but businesslike greeting of the island custodian, Bill. He and his wife are the only permanent residents. They live in a rustic farmhouse set above a sheep meadow which in turn slopes down to the sea. Bill arranged for our bags and supplies to be taken by ATV to our guest house, while he directed us to walk the 1.2 miles over the hill to get “a feel for the place,” as he put it. The track was steep and rain was falling, so we definitely “felt” the place.
Inner and outer exploration
As the gravel track descends toward Dry Harbor, it passes a steep defile with cliffs on either side and birch and oak trees set in vivid green grass. Turning the corner, we came to our stone cottage, a former chapel and pastor’s quarters. Next door sat a ruined schoolhouse, part of the now-deserted village that once spread uphill. At one point in the nineteenth century, more than 150 people lived on Rona, but by the mid-twentieth century everyone had gone. In our guest house, we found some old books detailing life here a hundred years ago. It was a hard life, yet it had a freedom and carefree quality many of us have now lost or perhaps have never known. The previous inhabitants subsisted on haddock, milk, potatoes, and whatever they could grow in their garden plots. They walked miles a day to and from school or to the original chapel that was set in a cave on the east coast of the island. We visited the cave one afternoon, squelching through the wet grass and descending with the help of ropes to the cave’s entrance, which looked out over the sea to the looming, grey-brown mountains of Torridon on the mainland. As though we’d entered some sort of time warp, we found everything still set up for services.
As we settled into our new quarters, we found that the caretaker had thoughtfully left some scotch in a carafe on the mantelpiece for us. He’d also set a fire ready to light in the grate since Scottish weather is unpredictable and even in August it can get chilly. From the picnic table on the flower-filled lawn, we enjoyed a dramatic view of the mountains of Skye spreading from the Old Man of Storr on the left to the weird outcrops of the Quiraing on the right. The mountaintops undulated in snake-like waves. Between Skye and the harbor was the open water of the Sound of Raasay.
Dry Harbor was so-named because at low tide, its beautiful circular shape empties out to reveal brown umber and yellow ochre seaweed mixed with lime green sea grass and numerous boulders. A ramp descends from the harbor bank and across the now-dry sea floor. I marveled at the strength and perseverance of the previous inhabitants who had removed the boulders to enable their boats to land safely. All around, the ghosts of these men, women, and children still impressed themselves on the edges of the landscape.
Both Wendy and I sensed the presence of a woman at the foot of our bed in the cottage, and the custodian later told us the former pastor’s wife is known to linger there. The presence was benign but added to the sense that we were temporary interlopers in someone else’s home.
The northern tip of Rona is the site of a lighthouse and a Ministry of Defense installation, but the vast majority of the island is wilderness. It is currently owned by a Danish woman who is intent on preserving the environment and has introduced 250 red deer, many of which we saw wandering around the overgrown meadows and damp woods near our cottage. They were friendly but I sensed they were bemusedly tolerating our presence. On occasion we would see them peeking in a window or gazing down from the ravine’s edge, keeping an eye on the strange, two-legged creatures who had chosen to visit their home.
Ancient is a word that comes easily to mind here. We walked to the island’s highest point one day and feeling carefree, we kicked our legs as we sat on a giant boulder. Knowing that these rocks have endured tectonic shifts, ice ages, and billions of years of wind, storm, and erosion inspired not just an awareness of our own insignificance but also a deep respect for these geologic brothers and sisters. They may be inanimate, but they are very much alive and have much to teach us if we are ready to learn.
The wind blows strong on Rona, clearing the lungs and also the head. Complication ends. The mind is stripped of its endless analyzing and only the elemental remains. This feeling of returning to simplicity informed many of our actions on the island. Cooking meals, hiking, quietly sitting, watching the ever-changing light on the hills and water, and viewing birds, otters, and seals all had a distinct significance. In addition, time seemed to slip by so fast. A week is hardly enough to settle into this between-world of living rocks, ghosts, light, and patient perseverance.
One of our stranger experiences here occurred to both Wendy and me independently before we shared it with each other. On most nights white light occasionally flashed through the cottage’s windows. It was similar to sheet lightning, but there was no storm, or to the beam of a lighthouse, but there were none where we were located. It might have been an electrical charge associated with hot air, but the air on Rona was cool. Whatever it was it only added to the unworldliness of the island and we found it intriguing rather than unnerving. The custodian asked us if we had seen any lights, but when we asked him what they were he had no clear answer.
Lingering in the liminal
It has been three years since we visited the island of Rona, but I return in consciousness often. My connection with this unique place is not yet complete, and I feel we will return someday.
I learned a number of lessons from our visit—first, that it takes time to stop and appreciate. The story that this island has to tell is old and deep. My week there made clear to me how superficial and distracted much of our modern-day life experience can be. I relished the opportunity to let the landscape speak to me.
Rona also taught me that life is lived most vividly and compellingly in the between world. The Celts and the peoples before them who’ve lived in the Scottish landscape for millennia were attuned to the liminal spaces—the threshold between waking and dream, work and rest, light and dark, Spirit and matter. Rona, for me, was that threshold experience, the doorway to an awareness that informs me to this day.
On a lighter note, it was also a fun week in a beautiful place with the one I love. One night, Bill and his wife Lorraine invited us to their home for dinner. They treated us to grilled langoustine and a delicious local stew known as Cullen skink, made with haddock, potatoes, and milk. We talked extensively over a few wee drams of whiskey, exploring what it is like to be permanent residents on this isolated island.
As Wendy and I took the boat back to Skye, dolphins crested the waves and more rainbows appeared. Rona, a place where the ordinary and extraordinary dwell together, receded. Yet it left me thinking that the meeting place of the ordinary and extraordinary is here and now, at the heart of us all.
The article originally appeared in the November/December 2020 edition of Unity Magazine. https://www.unity.org/publications/unity-magazine
For more information on Isle of Rona: https://isleofrona.com/stay-2/
Paul John Roach: Pauljohnroach@yahoo.com