Hinba Revisited: A New Attempt to Trace St Columba’s Lost Monastery

Discerning the location of St Columba’s unidentified monastery, Hinba, known from Adomnán’s hagiography the Vita Columbae, has been the quest of numerous scholars over the last century. These attempts have generally looked at the etymological meaning of the place name and traced it in the area of Dál Riata, the medieval Irish kingdom in today’s Scottish county of Argyll and Bute, in which St Columba’s monasteries were located. Nevertheless, the earlier identifications have failed to account for the spiritual and experiential aspects of both the literary and physical landscape, nor have they considered that hagiographies were written with another worldview. Arguably, examining Adomnán’s cognitive landscape would provide an alternative approach to Hinba’s location that may produce a more feasible suggestion. The aim of this paper is to explore the medieval monastery’s location by creating a cognitive map of Adomnán, which will be merged with the archaeological landscape. This paper suggests that the site of Kilmaha, located on a peninsula in Loch Awe, could possibly have been Hinba, by linking similarities in its archaeological landscape to the spiritual descriptions in the Vita Columbae.