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"Too good to last," grumbled the ferryman as the granite cliffs of the Ross of Mull, glowing salmon pink in strong sunshine, receded behind him. "There’ll be a bit of a blow by evening, I’d say."

Out across the water, Iona lay basking under an astonishingly blue Hebridean sky. Too blue to be true, the ferryman obviously thought. The village houses sparkled. The fields along the shore shone with an intense, rain-washed green. The abbey buildings, huddled round the squat tower of the church, stood out sharp and clear against the pale outcrops of Dun-I hill.

"Oh ... beautiful," sighed the American couple at the ferry rail beside me, with feeling. They had endured a week of mist and rain, such as only the Isle of Mull can lay on, in hopes of tasting this moment in just this way.

People tend to cross the Sound of Iona with a weight of expectation on them. Iona is a beautiful little island, friends tell you, a special island. There’s something about that place ... hard to explain, but you’ll see for yourself when you go there. Say a prayer for me, some add. Iona has magical beauty, for sure: it also has a spiritual resonance recognised all over the world. This was the island where the 6th-century Irish saint Columba nursed the spark of Christian faith in the darkest era of the Dark Ages and took it out across Scotland and the isles as an all-consuming flame.

Everyone makes for the abbey as soon as they step ashore. The summons of that cluster of stout grey buildings is irresistible. Nearby I found the chapel of St Oran, at the centre of a graveyard where stone slabs smooth with weathering sealed the graves of saints and prelates, kings and commoners.

On one shield-shaped memorial stone, someone had placed a posy of freshly picked primroses. ‘John Smith, May 1994’ read the already blurring inscription. ‘An Honest Man’s The Noblest Work of God’. The former Labour Party leader was brought at his request to Iona for burial. He shares these few yards of ground, opening on to a wonderful view of sea, coast and mountains, with nearly fifty kings of Scotland.

For a thousand years after St Columba’s mission, Iona was considered the holiest ground that anyone could be buried in. Iona’s craftsmen - masons, painters, carvers - were the envy of the Celtic world. Come the Reformation in the 1570s, however, Presbyterian zealots destroyed everything 'idolatrous' that they could find - stained glass, statues, illustrated manuscripts, and much of the fabric of the monastery buildings. They smashed over 300 exquisitely carved High Crosses, too; no one knows what saved those few that still stand around the abbey grounds.

Dr Johnson, visiting Iona with Boswell in 1773, found the abbey roofs all pulled down for their timber, and the floor of the church thick with muck. Boswell, peevish after spending a night in a haybarn, complained of the lack of marble monuments. A few decades later, Sir Walter Scott dismissed the place as ‘desolate and miserable’. So it remained, until the abbey church and buildings were painstakingly restored over several decades of the early 20th century.

Inside the abbey people sat quietly in the choir stalls or on chairs in front of lit candles, absorbed in prayer or contemplation. They might have been of any shade of faith or denomination, or of none. An air of restfulness and calm pervaded the place, intensified by sunshine pouring in through the windows in thick shafts.

I spent a few minutes in the abbey museum, admiring high-relief tomb carvings of bygone Scots kings and chieftains in full battle gear. Then I walked out into a morning as bright as glass, with the whole island lit for exploration.

Iona is only three miles long, and about half that wide: the perfect size to roam on foot. Down on the north shore the sands shone creamy white, the shallows an intense glass-green. The sea was as cold and clear as ice water. I tramped up across the dunes and climbed Dun-I, three hundred feet of ancient rocks, for the view: a horizon-filling gallery of basalt masterpieces, from the great cliffs and ledges of Mull to the strange submarine shapes of the Treshnish Isles out to the west.

A sharpening nip to the wind made me look south, where a familiar pearling of the sky and darkening of sea showed that the ferryman’s prophecy was set to come true. I plunged down off Dun-I, fumbled out gloves and scarf from the backpack, and set out for a serious stride over the machair - grassy sward grown up on a thick bed of shell sand. I found rabbit bones as delicate and thin as the finest eggshell porcelain, and crunched across the beaches to pick up pebbles of orange, green and black.

A little smattering of Gaelic brings a lot of pleasure in the Hebrides. I’d equipped myself with a dictionary, and savoured a rich stew of place-names as I went by the Nest of the Red-Haired Lad, the Port of the Coward and Weeper’s Rock down to the Port of the Coracle. St Columba brought his skin-covered boat in to the tiny beach here in 563 AD, a disgraced exile with the deaths of thousands of men on his conscience.

It was Columba’s unauthorised copying of a precious psalm-book that angered the High King of Ireland, and led to an all-out and horribly bloody battle on the shores of County Sligo. The exile’s penance was to bring more men to Christianity than he had caused to die that day. The Celtic Church that he established on Iona would last for a thousand years and extend its influence throughout the northern Christian world.

I lingered a long time in the rocky little cove, skimming pebbles of green marble across the waves and picturing the saint arriving on such a day of threatening weather. So the rain caught me before I had made it back to the village, blotting out sea and sky in a milky gauze that rippled across the fields.

It was a wild night in more ways than one. "Flook!" said the posters stuck up around the village. 'In the library, 9 pm.' Flook were in the middle of a Highlands and Islands tour, playing their funky jigs and reels in community halls and hotel bars. "We’ve been working up to Iona for two weeks," said their whistle player. "Should be some night."

Among the cases of faded old books, Flook let fly. Rain and wind lashed down outside, but the eighty people packed into the wood-panelled library were out to have a good time and couldn’t have cared less. In the pub after the show, island youngsters clustered round the band and told them jokes that would have made a sailor blush.

I was out walking the strand at six next morning, unable to stay in bed with reels still running in my head. Oystercatchers and starlings pattered on the tideline. A fierce wind raised whitecaps on a slate- grey sea, blowing from the south out of a sky already clearing to the sharpest of blues.

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