From the days of the ancient Celts, the unusual hexagonal basalt pillars of Scotland’s Fingal’s Cave has been a font of mythical and artistic inspiration, originally said to have been the pillars supporting a bridge for giants to do battle between Ireland and Scotland.
Scientists today say that the dramatic landscape is the result of the very slow cooling of lava, creating the striking pillars, which vault to heights that call to mind a cathedral within the cave, and swirl other areas of the Island of Staffa like sculptural brush strokes of a giant’s hand in others.
Not long after the cave’s rediscovery by naturalist Sir Joseph Banks in 1772, the island became the place to go for everyone from artists to Queen Victoria herself.
Novelist Sir Walter Scott described Fingal’s Cave as “…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.”
One of the most famous pieces of art inspired by the cave is Felix Mendelssohn’s “Fingal’s Cave Overture” from 1832, here conducted by Gary M Schneider overlaid with various shots of his geological inspiration:
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