About

Iona is a site of exceptional historical, archaeological, and religious interest, and has been since its foundation as a monastery around AD 563. Despite the multiple ways in which Iona has been of interest to scholars and the general public, its complex legacy of place-names has never been the subject of sustained scholarly investigation.

This project, funded by the AHRC, interrogates the dynamics of the namescape, the historical and changing landscape of names, of Iona and its environs, shedding light on its past and its complex present, and proposing new ways of curating place-names as part of heritage management.

What were, and are, the dynamics of the namescape of Iona and its environs?

Specific questions propelling this research have been:

  • What is its history, how has the island developed?
  • What does its namescape reveal about different periods of Iona’s history?
  • Who were the people who inscribed this landscape with different names?
  • How should we understand the identities of the various naming communities, and their relationships with each other and with the wider world? How do they shape memories of the past, and according to what world-views?
  • Who has the ‘authority’ to create new names, to overwrite one namescape with another?
  • How can an understanding of place-names enhance a community’s engagement with the Gaelic language, both the existing Gaelic-speaking community and those interested in learning.

OUTPUTS

The project set itself to publish research on these matters in a variety of forms, both scholarly and also more directed towards the general public. Some of the projects principal outputs have now been published. They include:

  1. The Iona Place-Name Map: an online resource which presents the research data on place-names and places in the form of an interactive map, allowing free access to the public and to scholars, helping them engage with the material. You can find the map and its data, including more information on all the place-names of, here:

https://iona-placenames.glasgow.ac.uk/map/

  1. Ì Chaluim Chille: A collection of papers, originally delivered at a Conference in December 2021, and published as a book on 9 June, 2025: Ì Chaluim Chille: Interdisciplinary Studies on Iona and Columba on the 1500th anniversary of the birth the saint, edited by Sofia Evemalm-Graham, with Thomas Owen Clancy, Katherine Forsyth, and Gilbert Márkus. This is an online publication, and you can find it here:

https://clog.glasgow.ac.uk/ojs/index.php/frog/issue/view/28

  1. Iona’s Namescape: Investigations and Reflections, by Thomas Owen Clancy, Sofia Evemalm-Graham, E. Mairi MacArthur and Gilbert Márkus. This book collects the various blogs made by project members over the course of the project into a more permanent and easily accessible format.

Further outputs of the project will in due course include:

  1. The Place-Names of Iona. A full survey of the place-names of Iona which will be published as a single volume in the Survey of Scottish Place-Names series, to which all of the team will contribute.
  2. The Place-Names of Staffa and The Place-Names of the Ross of Mull. Two further surveys of the place-names of the nearby island of Staffa, and of the place-names of the Ross of Mull, by project team-member Alasdair Whyte.
  3. A popular guide for visitors to the island (over 130,000 a year!), to help them engage with landscape and place-names, and thus with the communities of the island, past and present.

During the course of the funded part of the project we also hosted a number of events, both on Iona and in Glasgow, celebrating Iona’s place-names and heritage and making the work of the project known. We were greatly assisted in this by our Knowledge Exchange Liaison Group and by our Academic Advisory Board. One particularly exciting set of events celebrated the poet and singer of Iona and Mull, Johnie Campbell, Teonaidh Chailein. You can find recordings of his work here and this will be joined by other resources soon.

Across the project we produced a steady stream of on-line studies and reflections on Iona’s namescape in the form of blogs and short ‘Name of the Month’ posts. You can follow the project’s progress on our blog-site, here and on social media here.