Today’s Place: Fingal’s Cave

Fingal’s Cave-Scotland

Three features combine to make Fingal’s Cave on Staffa perhaps the best known of all caves.

Its structure is unique. Nowhere else is there a sea cave formed completely in hexagonally jointed basalt. Its appeal lies in the size, the sounds, the colors, and the remarkable symmetry of this 227-foot cavern, and by Nature’s gift of fractured columns which form a crude walkway just above high water level, allowing exploring visitors to go far inside.

Secondly, the evergreen popularity of Mendelssohn’s Hebrides Overture (Fingal’s Cave) provides a continuous stirring reminder of this wonder of the world.

And thirdly, the impact of the cave on all those who enter it, and especially on those who do so alone, is likely to be remembered for life. Sir Walter Scott put it into words for us:

“..one of the most extraordinary places I ever beheld. It exceeded, in my mind, every description I had heard of it …composed entirely of basaltic pillars as high as the roof of a cathedral, and running deep into the rock, eternally swept by a deep and swelling sea, and paved, as it were, with ruddy marble, baffles all description.”