Returning to Glasgow

Fortunately we left Iona two days ago.  Today was the original day planned to travel back to Glasgow.  Checking my CalMac Ferry App, I learned the ferry off Iona was canceled all day because of the weather.

Yesterday we visited the Govan Old Parish Church.  I was curious about it because it was the parish where George MacLeod, the founder of the Iona Community, was minister.  However, it had even more treasures than I expected.  The church is no longer an active parish church, though some services are held there. 

It does house the Govan Stones.  Tombstones from the graveyard around the church date back to the 850's.

We had a volunteer guide, Simon, who took us around, describing the features of the various stone and the history that had been forgotten for centuries. He explained that this stone is from a later period.  The letters carved on it were not originally on the stone, but were added later when the stone was reused in a second burial years later. 

The church was in the middle of the Glasgow Shipyards. When in 1930 MacLeod became minister, there were few ships being built because of the depression.  He left Govan in 1938 to create an experimental community designed to bring together the working class and the educated ministerial students that was to evolve into the Iona Community. 

Here is a detail of a modern Celtic cross that is outside of the church.  The egg and snake design is the same as St. Martin's cross outside of Iona Abbey.  This is likely the kind of carving and detail that cross would have had when it was originally carved 1200 years ago.  But with over a millennia of erosion, the cross lost the definition of the snake heads.

We would have seen the Old Govan Church last year when we had looked across the River Clyde from the Riverside Museum.  The last picture is a view of that museum with the Clyde in the foreground.  It is good to keep finding new riches in a place visited before.