Known for its natural acoustics, Fingal’s Cave is a sea cave located in the Inner Hebrides of Scotland, on the uninhabited island of Staffa. The cave is a component of a national nature reserve owned by the National Trust for Scotland. Fingal’s Cave got its name from the epic poem’s titular hero written by Scottish poet and historian James Macpherson in the eighteenth century.
Creation
Fingal’s Cave shares structural similarities with Ulva and the Giant’s Causeway in Northern Ireland, having been built entirely from hexagonally jointed basalt columns within a Paleocene lava flow.
Here, cooling on the top and lower surfaces of the cooled lava led to contraction and fractures that began as regular hexagonal fractures that ran perpendicular to the cooling surfaces and then progressed to a blocky tetragonal pattern.
These fissures progressively moved toward the flow’s center as cooling proceeded, creating the long, hexagon-shaped columns that are seen in the cross-section that has been eroded by waves today. Desiccation fractures in mud exhibit hexagonal fracture patterns like to these when contraction results from water loss rather than cooling.
Past Events
From an early time until 1777, Fingal’s Cave was a part of the Clan MacQuarrie’s Ulva estate. Naturalist Sir Joseph Banks, who lived in the eighteenth century, first made the cave known to English-speaking people in 1772.
After the namesake of an epic poem written by Scottish poet and historian James Macpherson in the eighteenth century, it was dubbed Fingal’s Cave. It was included in his Ossian cycle of poetry, which he claimed was derived from ancient Scottish Gaelic poetry. According to Irish legend, the hero Fingal is known as Fionn mac Cumhaill.
It is hypothesized that Macpherson mistranslated the name, which in old Gaelic would have appeared as “Finn,” and so represented it as Fingal, which means “white stranger.” According to the Giant’s Causeway legend, Finn, often known as Fionn, built the causeway that connects Scotland and Ireland.
Observation
The sea fills the cave, which has a huge arched entrance. The cave’s entrance is passed by a number of sightseeing boats that are offered by nearby firms from April to September. When the weather is calm, one may disembark at the island’s landing site (which some of these cruises allows) and hike the short distance to the cave, where a pathway made of broken columns develops just above high tide, allowing for foot exploration. The island of Iona appears to be framed by the entry from the inside.
In writing and the arts
The strange echoes in the cave are supposed to have inspired romantic musician Felix Mendelssohn, who visited in 1829 and composed The Hebrides, Op. 26, popularly known as Fingal’s Cave Overture.
The overture by Mendelssohn helped to make the cave a well-liked tourist attraction. Author Jules Verne was among the other well-known 19th-century visitors. He included it in his book Le Rayon Vert (The Green Ray) and made reference to it in Journey to the Center of the Earth and The Mysterious Island.
Along among them were the romantic painter J. M. W. Turner, who painted Staffa, Fingal’s Cave in 1832, and poets William Wordsworth, John Keats, and Alfred, Lord Tennyson.
Queen Victoria also traveled to the cave in 1860, and the German author Theodor Fontane wrote about it in his travelogue Jenseit des Tweed (Beyond the Tweed, Pictures and Letters from Scotland).
Fingals-Höhle is a composition by 19th-century Austro-Hungarian guitarist and composer Johann Kaspar Mertz from his collection of character pieces for guitar called Bardenklänge.
Additionally, August Strindberg, a playwright, used a location known as “Fingal’s Grotta” for sequences from his play A Dream Play. Fingal’s Cave was called “one of the most extraordinary places I ever beheld” by Scottish author Sir Walter Scott. It excelled all the descriptions I had heard about it, in my opinion.
It defies description since it is made completely of reddish marble paving that is as high as a cathedral’s roof, runs deep into the rock, and is constantly washed over by a deep, swollen sea.”
The Giant’s Causeway and the cave were utilized by artist Matthew Barney for the opening and closing sequences of his art film, Cremaster 3. For a show at the Foksal Gallery in Poland in 2008, video artist Richard Ashrowan spent several days filming the interior of Fingal’s Cave.
It’s named after one of Pink Floyd’s early tunes. Although it was not utilized, this instrumental was composed for the movie Zabriskie Point.
Caltech’s Lloyd House features a fresco that depicts Fingal’s Cave.
Filmed there was the Alistair MacLean novel-based picture When Eight Bells Toll, starring Anthony Hopkins.
More likely than not, MacPherson’s poems served as the inspiration for the municipality of Fingal, Tasmania, not the cave itself.
Measurements
- 20 m (66 ft) high and 69 m (227 ft) deep, according to Wood-Nuttall Encyclopaedia, 1907.
- 45 m (150 ft) deep and 22 m (72 ft) high, according to National Public Radio in 2005.
- Show Caves of the World are 23 meters (75 feet) high and 85 meters (279 feet) deep.
