Photos: Staffa and Fingal’s Cave

The island of Staffa, which means “stave” or “pillar island” in Old Norse, lies just west of the much larger island of Mull. Staffa has drawn famous visitors for the past two centuries, including Samuel Johnson and James Boswell, Sir Walter Scott, John Keats, Robert Louis Stevenson, Felix Mendelssohn, Jules Verne, Williams Wordsworth, and Queen Victoria and Prince Albert. Several cruise companies offer excursions to Staffa from Mull, and I recently documented my trip with Turus Mara.

Fingal’s Cave was named after the Celtic warrior in James Macpherson’s ancient “found” epic, Fingal. He may have been Irish, he may have been Scottish; whatever the case, he’s attributed with building the Giant’s Causeway between County Antrim in Northern Ireland to western Scotland. Please enjoy these pictures of the magnificent Staffa and its incredible caves.

The famous poet John Keats once wrote of Staffa, in his poem “Staffa“:

Not Aladdin magian
Ever such a work began;
Not the wizard of the Dee
Ever such a dream could see;
Not St. John, in Patmos’ Isle,
In the passion of his toil,
When he saw the churches seven,
Golden aisl’d, built up in heaven,
Gazed at such a rugged wonder.