Columbanus had set a pattern of mission from Ireland and Scotland, and other Celtic monks extended his initiative still further by taking Christianity beyond the ghost of the imperial frontier into northern Europe. But now another mission had been launched in the opposite direction, from Rome itself, by Pope Gregory I. In 597, the year that Abbot Columba died far away in Iona, a party of monks and priests set out from Rome on the Pope’s command; they were bound for the Atlantic Isles under the leadership of a monk from Gregory’s monastery of St Andrew, called Augustine.
