Industrial Monument - Iona

Original acrylic on canvas by David Page. 

This painting is one of David's new 2026 collection, Grit and Grace: Iona. 

Each painting in The Last Munro exhibition is accompanied by a limited edition, large-format book, featuring the full collection and David's insightful personal notes.

ARTIST'S DESCRIPTION:

Argyll Vol. 4: Iona by the Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Scotland describes in detail the historical importance of what it calls an “Industrial Monument” in the south of the island:

“Marble is found in several places on Iona, the most extensive source being located on the SE coast about 350m NE of Rubha na Carraig Géire. Here a vertical band of forsterite tremolite-marble, having an average width of about 7m, extends inland from the foreshore for at least 100m. The stone is white, streaked and mottled with yellowish-green serpentine. The visible remains, situated in a steep-sided gully with the main working-face on the W, evidently date from the most recent period of quarrying activity, early in the present century”.

The care lavished on this industrial site in the description matches that given to the ecclesiastical monuments of the island:

“They comprise machinery (including a producer-gas engine manufactured by Fielding and Platt, Gloucester, and a cutting-frame by G Anderson, Arbroath), a small rock-cut reservoir, a gunpowder store, and a roughly built quay which provided the only means of transporting equipment to and marble from the site”.

Today, it is another of the island’s isolated escapes, where one can sit in isolation amidst the wasted rocks and rusting archaeology of the excavations. It’s also a prescient link back to the Abbey that “the high alter of the medieval abbey-church appears to have been made from this material”.

Want to learn more about the collection? Read David's full artist statement here.