Welcome
I often find evocative gems like this on my wanders through the internet. They send me searching to the corners of the web for everything I can find about the topic, sometimes for an evening, sometimes for a few weeks, before something equally interesting catches my eye and I move onto the next thing. Rather than let the knowledge I've gathered get pushed to the corners of my mind and eventually get forgotten, I though I would set it down here and share it. Expect posts on railways, canals, industry and architecture with some of my own photos of historic places that have managed to survive into the modern world.
This picture from the dawn of photographyseems like a good place to start the journey. Taken by Thomas Keith on 1st September 1856, it shows the ruins of the monastery of St Columba on the Inner Hebridean island of Iona.
"Thomas Keith took his pictures before seven in the morning and after four in the afternoon to achieve the raking light, which picked out architectural detail and emphasised the structure of a building, as shown in this photograph of Iona Abbey. When Keith exhibited the picture in December 1856, a critic hailed it as 'a vigorous and most powerful picture'. The figure is probably Keith's wife, Elizabeth Johnston, whose presence offers us a nineteenth-century meditation on the ancient Christian ruins of the abbey, founded by St Columba in the sixth century."
Interestingly, not only have the ruins survived but the monastery was actually rebuilt in the early 20th Century and is now home to an ecumenical community.
Sources and further reading:
https://www.nationalgalleries.org/art-and-artists/10329/iona
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iona_Abbey
https://iona.org.uk/island-centres/the-abbey/
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