Fingal's Singing Cave
What makes Fingal’s Cave so unique? This famous sea cave is located on the small island of Staffa, off the Scottish coast of Great Britain. The island is only 1 kilometer long and half a kilometer wide. Endless rains and sea waves drilled a whole system of caves on this small piece of land. The largest of them was named after the giant Fingal, the hero of the Irish epic.
Staffa is the smallest island in the Inner Hebrides. Its area is only 33 hectares, and the highest point rises above sea level by 42 m. The island gained fame in 1722, when it was visited by the famous English naturalist Jazeph Banks (1743 - 1820), who described the cave of Fingal.
One of the most striking features of the island of Staffa, which immediately catches the eye of the visitor, are natural basalt columns, surprisingly regular in shape. Most columns are 6-sided, but there are also 3-sided and 8-sided ones. They acquired such an unusual shape due to the long process of crystallization of volcanic lava.
The main hall of Fingal's Cave is 75 m long, 20 m wide, and 14 m high. In the Gaelic language, this cave was called Uam Bin (Cave of Melodies). The cave got its name in honor of the epic hero Fingal (Finn MacCool) from the Scottish poet James MacPherson. According to Irish legend, the giant Fingal built a dam connecting Scotland and Ireland.
A narrow path leads to the cave of Fingal, surrounded by a magnificent basalt colonnade. The passage to the cave is so narrow that it is impossible to get there by boat.
The huge hall of the cave multiply repeats the sounds of the surf, and the whole cave literally sings, justifying its ancient name Uamh-Binn - "Singing Cave".
After the naturalist Joseph Banks described Fingal's Cave in 1722, Queen Victoria, Walter Scott, William Wordsworth, John Keats, Alfred Tennyson, and Jules Verne himself visited it. In 1832, artist Joseph Turner painted a landscape depicting the famous cave.
When the composer Felix Mendelssohn (the author of the famous Wedding March) visited the cave in 1829, he was so struck by the amazing play of the echo in its halls that it inspired him to create an overture called "The Hebrides or Fingal's Cave".
Fingal (the name can be translated as "White Wanderer") is one of the favorite heroes of the Celtic epic. According to one of the legends, when he was going to fight the terrible giant Benandonner, he built a huge bridge-dam, and lay down to rest before the battle. While he slept, the giant, in search of his opponent, came across the bridge to his house. But Fingal's wife Unah deceived the giant. She pointed to the sleeping Fingal, covered with a blanket, and said that this was his newborn son, and that Fingal himself was not at home now. Seeing the giant "baby", the giant was so horrified that he rushed to run, destroying the dam behind him.
There are several versions of this legend, but each time it ends with the cowardly flight of Fingal's enemy and the destruction of the dam. Magnificent basalt columns, according to legend, are the remains of piles driven into the bottom of the Irish Sea by Fingal.
Fingal's Cave is not the only place where such amazing basalt columns are found. Some 40,000 of these linked columns form the Giant's Causeway (which was also part of Fingal's causeway) along the coastline of County Antrim, in the northeast of Ireland.
