Staffa - so near yet so far

I booked to go on a day trip to Staffa and Lunga on the Treshnish Isles in May 2007.  However due to the large swell we were not able to land on Staffa, so I cannot count it as one of my islands.  We did however see Fingal's Cave from the sea.

Staff is a mile long by 0.25 miles wide.   It was given to the National Trust for Scotland in 1986 and is uninhabited.  The basalt columns were formed by volcanoes and are 30 metres high in places and are topped with amorphous basalt.

Fingal's Cave

Fingal's Cave

Fingal’s Cave is 20 metres high by 15 metres wide and 70 metres deep.  It has been popular with visitors since the 1820s.  Famous visitors included the artist JMW Turner, John Keats, Alfred Lord Tennyson, Sir Robert Peel, Jules Verne and Queen Victoria.   Sir Walter Scott wrote about it in his poem Lord of the Isles:

Merrily, merrily goes the bark
On a breeze from the northward free,
So shoots through the morning sky the lark
Or the swan through the summer sea.
The shores of Mull on the eastward lay,
And Ulva dark, and Colonsay,
And all the group of islets gay
That guard famed Staffa round.
Then all unknown its columns rose,
Where dark and undisturb'd repose
The cormorant had found,
And the shy seal had quiet home,
And welter'd in that wondrous dome,
Where, as to shame the temples deck'd
By skill of earthly architect,
Nature herself, it seem'd, would raise
A Minister to her Maker's praise!
Not for a meaner use ascend
Her columns, or her arches bend;
Nor of a theme less solemn tells
That mighty surge that ebbs and swells,
And still, between each awful pause,
From the high vault an answer draws,
In varied tone prolong'd and high,
That mocks the organ's melody.
Nor doth its entrance front in vain
To old Iona's holy fane,
That Nature's voice might seem to say,
'Well hast thou done, frail Child of clay!
Thy humble powers that stately shrine
Task'd high and hard - but witness mine!'

Felix Mendelssohn visited in 1829 and inspired by the sounds in the cave 20 years later he wrote his Hebridean Overture.

There are also other caves on the island, including Boat and MacKinnon.