Fingal's Cave

Listen first. Before you look too closely, just listen. The sea moves into the cave, strikes the back wall, and comes rolling out again with a deep, hollow boom. Underfoot, the rock is not smooth and shapeless, as you might expect. It is made of the flat tops of stone columns, each one an angular tile, fitted against its neighbours like a giant honeycomb. Damp air brushes your face. Somewhere above, seabirds call. This is Fingal's Cave, on the small island of Staffa, off the west coast of Scotland.

Staffa sits in the Inner Hebrides, the chain of islands that runs along this ragged Atlantic coast. It lies a short boat ride west of the Isle of Mull, and close to the holy island of Iona. Nobody lives here now. The island is small, treeless, and capped with green turf. But its sides tell a different story. From the sea, Staffa looks almost built, as if someone stacked thousands of grey pillars together and set a grassy lid on top. Even the name points to this. Staffa is generally thought to come from Old Norse, meaning something like the island of staves or pillars.

So how did these columns form? The answer is volcanic, and very old. Around sixty million years ago, as the North Atlantic Ocean began to open, huge sheets of lava poured out across this region. Where a thick layer of molten rock cooled slowly and evenly, it shrank. As it shrank, it cracked into regular shapes, much like mud cracking as it dries in the sun. Many of the columns here have six sides, but look carefully and you will find five-sided and four-sided ones too. Nature did not use a ruler.

Here is a detail that surprises many visitors. This same ancient lava field stretches across the sea to Northern Ireland. The Giant's Causeway, on the Antrim coast, belongs to the same volcanic episode. Legend has it that the two places are connected for another reason. According to one popular tale, the Irish giant Fionn mac Cumhaill built a causeway of stone across the sea to reach Scotland. Geologists explain it with cooling lava. The storytellers prefer the giant. Standing here, it is easy to understand why both versions have survived.

The giant also gives the cave its English name. Fingal is a form of Fionn, the great hero of Gaelic legend. In the eighteenth century, a Scottish writer named James Macpherson published poems he said were translations of an ancient bard called Ossian. In them, Fingal is a noble warrior king. The poems became a sensation across Europe. Many scholars later doubted that they were genuine ancient works. But by then the romance had taken hold, and the cave carried Fingal's name into the imagination of readers far from Scotland.

The older Gaelic name is quieter, and perhaps more honest. Locals called the cave Uamh-Binn, which is usually translated as the melodious cave. Stand still for a moment and you will hear why. The shape of the chamber gathers the sound of every wave. The water slaps, sighs, and booms against the stone. On a calm day, it is a soft, rhythmic breathing. On a rougher day, the whole cave seems to echo. The music here is not a metaphor. It is simply the sea, amplified by rock.

For centuries, few outsiders knew this place existed. That changed in 1772, when the naturalist Joseph Banks visited Staffa on his way to Iceland. Banks had recently returned from sailing with Captain Cook. He was a well-known figure, and his account of the island's columns was published and widely read. After that, Staffa became a destination. Travellers began to make the difficult journey across open water, many of them hoping to see something that matched the wild, ancient Scotland of the Ossian poems.

The most famous visitor arrived in 1829. Felix Mendelssohn, a young German composer, toured the Highlands and Islands that summer. The crossing to Staffa was rough, and he is said to have suffered badly from seasickness. Yet the Hebrides stayed with him. He wrote the overture now known as The Hebrides, and also often called Fingal's Cave. Listen to its opening and you may hear the swell of the water in the strings. It is a piece of music shaped, in part, by the sea around you now.

Mendelssohn was not alone. Over the nineteenth century, a long line of writers and artists made the trip. The painter J. M. W. Turner visited and later painted Staffa wrapped in storm cloud and steamboat smoke. The poets John Keats, William Wordsworth and Alfred Tennyson all came. Queen Victoria saw the cave from her boat. Jules Verne, the French novelist, also visited and wrote it into his fiction. For a small, uninhabited island, Staffa has attracted a remarkable crowd of creative minds.

Today the island is cared for by the National Trust for Scotland, a conservation charity. Boats bring visitors across from Mull, Iona and the mainland, weather permitting. And the weather here really does decide everything. Landing on Staffa depends on the swell, and some trips can only circle the island. If you have stepped ashore today, you are lucky. The landing stage leads to a path, and the path leads along the broken tops of columns toward the mouth of the cave.

The walk into the cave is part of the experience. A handrail runs along the wall, and the column tops form an uneven ledge just above the water. The stone can be wet and slippery, so take your time. As you move inside, look up. The roof is also made of columns, but here many of them are broken off, so you see their ends hanging overhead. Look down, and the water below often shows a deep green colour, clear enough to see the columns continue beneath the surface.

Above the cliffs, Staffa has other residents. In the warmer months, Atlantic puffins come ashore to nest in burrows in the grassy clifftops. They are small, upright seabirds with bright orange feet and striped beaks. On Staffa they are often surprisingly unafraid of people who sit quietly nearby. Many visitors come for the cave and leave talking about the puffins. If you have time after the cave, climb the steps to the top of the island and look out across the sea toward Mull, Iona and the open Atlantic.

Before you leave the cave, turn around and face the entrance. From inside, the arch frames a bright piece of sky and sea. The columns on either side look like the walls of a great hall, and the light catches the wet stone. Notice the sound again, now that you know its story. Banks heard it. Mendelssohn heard it. Turner and Keats heard it. Long before any of them, Gaelic speakers heard it and named the cave for its music. The waves are still making that same sound now.

As you walk back along the ledge, keep one hand on the rail and let your eyes drift across the stone. Each column top under your feet is a small piece of a cooling lava flow, cracked into shape before humans existed. The boat waits at the landing. The gulls circle. Behind you, the cave keeps breathing in and out with the tide. Take one last look, and one last listen, before the sea carries you away from Staffa.