The path is black before you, shards of slate and mudstone mingling into a thick, dark paste that mires your thin leather soles. Yet somehow in this late evening light, the land seems lit from within: a liquid gold bursting from every crevice in the moss-laden hillside and blazing from patches of heather.

A chime-like trickling of water breaks the silence of the Way, and you follow it to find a crystal-clear well, just as the annals said, with a burn tumbling from it, down the hillside beneath a web of bracken. You pause to fill the simple earthenware cup that hangs from your pack - the water is cool and copper-like to the tongue. Then you follow the sound of the burn, down toward the lochside.

Refreshed, you take your time as you draw level with the mighty waterway, watching the shadows of the ash trees grow longer. You press your hand to each trunk as you pass, wondering how long these trees stood here before you, and how long they will stand once you’re gone.

Soon the path becomes a short scrambling ascent, and you find yourself stooping low over the crooked stick you carved at Lindisfarne. You are only too glad when you find a little clearing beneath the curtain of the woods where you can rest a while.

There you breath deeply, the tang of bracken thick in the balmy air, and the wet, dark decay of deep woodland. As you sigh out, you take in the view: the deepening blue of the long sea loch, and the russet orange of the hillsides behind them. Further back dark mountains loom, the sun already below their lofty heights.

Amongst them, you know, lies the glittering jewel of Loch Lomond, and further still Iona. The thought brings a gasp of delight even now. The Lord knows your path has been a long one, and hard. But now you are on your way home.

***

We are blessed to have found our home in a part of the world with a tapestry of stories to its name, from Celtic saints to Highland rebels.

The name of our beautiful cottage, Barremman, is one such touchstone to the area’s rich history. Coming from the Gaelic “barr-Adamnan”, it means “the height of Adamnan”.

Adamnan of Iona (624-704) was an Irish abbot and hagiographer, perhaps best known for writing The Life of Columba, which remains a vital source for our knowledge of the early Celtic church. He also wrote On Holy Places, which is an account of early Christian centres of pilgrimage.

Pilgrimage marks the soil at 2 Barremman Cottage too. We are positioned just a little way away from an ancient track, known by historians to be an ancient pilgrim path from Glasgow to Iona through the Western Highlands.

We have to wonder whether Adamnan himself walked on this path during one of his journeys between Iona and Lindisfarne, pausing on the land now known as “the height of Adamnan” to survey the beautiful Gare Loch beneath him.

Perhaps he idled here a while, visiting the local shrine to Rosneath’s own saint, St Modan.

Modan traveled through Rosneath some hundred years before Adamnan’s own pilgrimages, traveling from his home in the Kyles of Bute over the mountains of Cowal and through Argyllshire, before coming to rest for a time between Loch Long and Gare Loch.

The beauty of our little peninsula must have left its mark on the pilgrim, because after a lifetime of mission in Dunbarton, Loch Lomond, Stirling and Falkirk, he returned to Rosneath to spend his final days.

Perhaps Abbot Adamnan once stood in our very back garden, tracing the footsteps of St Modan before him. If so, we hope that the view over the loch and the mossy tracks over the hills gave them as much peace and joy as they give us now.