Welcome to the website for Iona’s Namescape: Place-Names and their dynamics in Iona and its environs
Name of the month: June 2025
Our final Name of the Month, as the Iona’s Namescape project comes to the end of its funded period, is, of course the name of the island itself. In Gaelic a very simple name (Ì, also Eilean Ì), it has had a long and complicated history of the name being changed, augmented and reinterpreted, across several languages. For all that, we are no nearer to knowing what its original name in Gaelic means. It is quite likely that, like a number of other Hebridean island names, it is very ancient, and perhaps survives from a language spoken in Scotland long before Gaelic or the other Celtic languages.
This is a project funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council and based in Celtic & Gaelic at the University of Glasgow. The funded period of the project ran from October 2020 until June 2025, and work on some of the project outputs is still continuing.
We are partnered with the two heritage bodies in whose care Iona and Staffa sit: the National Trust for Scotland and Historic Environment Scotland.
The core objective of the project is a survey of the place-names of Iona, as well as the Ross of Mull and the nearby island of Staffa. This research will be made available in a number of ways. Currently, this is primarily accessible using the Map of Iona Place-Names, available here.
We have also produced a number of ancillary publications, available here.
Across the funded period of the project we produced various blogs and ‘names of the month’, which you can read about here.
More detail about the project can be found here.