The singing cave of the Fingal

This famous sea cave is located on a small island of Staffa, lying off the Scottish coast of Great Britain. In the length of the island has only 1 kilometer and half a kilometer in width. Endless rains and sea waves drilled on this small piece of land a whole system of caves. The largest of them was named after the giant Fingal – the hero of the Irish epic.

Staff Island is the smallest island that is part of the inner Hebride Islands. Its area is only 33 hectares, and the highest point rises above the sea level by 42 m. The island gained fame in 1722, when it was visited by the famous English naturalist Jazet Banks (1743 – 1820), which described the Fingala cave.

One of the most striking features of the island of Staffa, which immediately catches the eye, is natural basalt columns, surprisingly correct shape. Most columns have a 6-sided shape, but there are 3-sided and 8-sided. They acquired such an unusual form due to the long process of crystallization of volcanic lava.

The main hall of the Fingal cave has a length of 75 m, in a width of 20 m, and in a height of 14 m. In Gel, this cave was called UAM-TIN (cave of melodies). The cave received its name in honor of the epic hero of the Fingal (Finn McCulus) from the Scottish poet James MacPherson. According to Irish legends, the giant Fingal built a dam connecting Scotland and Ireland.

A narrow path surrounded by a magnificent basaltic colonnade leads into the cave of the Fingal. The passage to the cave is so narrow that it is impossible to get there on a boat.

The huge hall of the cave repeatedly 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 the cave of Fingal in 1722, Queen Victoria, Walter Scott, William Wordsworth, John Kits, Alfred tennison, and Jules Verne himself visited. In 1832, the artist Joseph Turner wrote a landscape on which he captured the famous cave.

When the composer Felix Mendelssohn (author of the famous wedding march) visited the cave in 1829, he was so amazed at the Echo’s amazing game in her halls that this inspired him to create a navel called “Hebrides or Fingalov Cave”.

Fingal (the name can be translated as a “white wanderer”) – one of the favorite heroes of the Celtic epic. According to one of the legends, he was about to fight the formidable giant Benandner, he built a huge bridge bridge, and lay down in front of the battle to rest. While he was sleeping, the giant in search of his enemy himself came to his house on the bridge. But the wife of Fingal Unya deceived the giant. She pointed to the sleeping Fingal, covered with a blanket, and said that this was his newborn son, and that the Fingala himself was not at home now. Seeing the giant “baby”, the giant experienced such horror that he rushed to run, destroying the dam.

There are several versions of this legend, but each time it ends with the cowardly flight of the enemy of the Fingal and the destruction of the dam. Gorgeous basalt columns, according to legend, are the remains of piles driven into the bottom of the Irish sea by the Fingal.

The Fingala cave is not the only place where such amazing basalt columns are found. About 40,000 such columns associated with each other form the road of giants (which was also part of a dams built by the Fingal) in the coastal strip of the county of the Atrim, located in the northeast of Ireland.

See also:
Swallow cave,
Finding an endless cave,
Cave of reed flute