Fingal’s Cave

Fingal's Cave is a sea cave on the uninhabited island of Staffa, in the Inner Hebrides, and it is famous for how it sounds. The National Trust for Scotland owns it as part of a national nature reserve.

It is made entirely of hexagonal basalt columns, formed in a Paleocene lava flow. As the flow cooled from its top and bottom surfaces it contracted and cracked, starting in a blocky four-sided pattern and settling into regular hexagons, with the fractures running perpendicular to the cooling surfaces. As cooling continued those cracks extended toward the middle of the flow, producing the long columns you now see in wave-eroded cross-section. The Giant's Causeway in Northern Ireland is the same rock doing the same thing, and the mythology followed the geology: the legend has Finn building a causeway between Ireland and Scotland.

The cave was part of the Ulva estate of Clan MacQuarrie until 1777, and Sir Joseph Banks brought it to the attention of the English-speaking world in 1772. The name comes from the hero of James Macpherson's Ossian cycle. In Irish myth that hero is Fionn mac Cumhaill, and it is suggested Macpherson arrived at Fingal, meaning white stranger, by misreading a name that in old Gaelic would appear as Finn.

Felix Mendelssohn came in 1829 and wrote The Hebrides, Op. 26, better known as the Fingal's Cave Overture, said to be inspired by the strange echoes inside. His overture is what made the cave a destination. Jules Verne, Wordsworth, Keats, Tennyson and Turner all followed.

Cruises run April to September. In calm weather some land, and a row of fractured columns forms a walkway just above the tide, so you can go in on foot. From inside, the entrance frames Iona across the water.