9/30: Inner Hebrides's Magical Isles of Mull & Staffa!

One of the reasons we'd chosen to spend a second night in the delightful port town and low-key resort of Oban that was located halfway between the Lowland cities of Glasgow and Edinburgh and the Highland communities further north of Glencoe and the Isle of Skye was because Oban was also known as 'the gateway to the isles' with handy connections to the Hebrides Islands. Months earlier we'd made reservations for a one-day tour of the dramatic and historic Inner Hebrides islands of Mull, Staffa, and Iona with West Coast Tours. Even though we're not normally big fans of tours, we'd read that this one was particularly good because of the narration on one of the legs.

The 35-minute ferry ride to Craignure on the Isle of Mull left just before 10.

A Scottish character to be sure!

Lismore Lighthouse:

I know we passed Ben Nevis, the tallest mountain in Britain, on the ferry crossing but I neglected to verify if the mountain in the distance was it!

Five minutes before landing, we spotted Duart Castle, the 13th century home of the ancient Maclean clan. It was built on a high crag at the end of a peninsula that jutted out into the Sound of Mull. 

On our arrival in Craignure, we were escorted to a waiting double-decker bus and introduced to our driver, Sheila, who told us she'd be taking on this single-track road to Fionnphort, the ferry terminal on Mull's southeast coast and located almost a two-hour drive away. Sheila mentioned that, though the 28th Clan Chief of Maclean was in his 70s, he was still very hands-on on his estate, also called Black Rock, and still cut his own grass!

Sheila commented that because there had been very little 'social housing' or subsidized housing on the island, this new housing development for low-income residents had been built.

Mull, the second-largest of the Inner Hebrides after Skye, had a half-million visitors last year and was home to 3,000 residents. 

Sheila wasn't reticent about making her opinions known about other drivers on the island's very narrow single road, pointing out that it was always their responsibility to back up to one of these turnouts when approaching a bus!

I could see how the nearly 300 scenic miles of coastline on Mull attracted so many tourists each year. I wondered how many were day-trippers like everyone on the bus and therefore didn't contribute much to the local economy other than the cost of our transportation. But I guess on the positive side, neither did we do anything to mar the island's beauty.

Sheila stated a lot of Iona residents participated in the cultivation of mussels along the coast which sold for about $4 a kilo. Sorry for the green hues - it came from the tinted window through which I took the photo.

Sheila paused for a bit at Strathcoil so we could look at the monument to Dugald MacPhail (1818-1887), a poet, bard, and Gaelic speaker whom she described as an anarchist. After he relocated to England, he wrote The Isle of Mull which has become the island's unofficial national anthem.

Hill of the Cattle, one of the Graham mountains, was 2,500 ft. high.

Sheila told us a bit about the Highland Clearances, the forced eviction of inhabitants of the Highlands and western islands of Scotland. They began in the mid-to-late 18th century and continued intermittently into the mid-19th century. The removals cleared the land of people primarily to allow for the introduction of sheep.

I think these were the ruins where a tower had been built during Victorian times, according to Sheila.

Steven especially was glad he'd left the driving to Sheila on Mull when he saw how very narrow the road was. He'd just driven 2,500 kms around the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland on our month-long trip to the island and navigating those very narrow roads was enough to do any non-native in, especially while driving a clutch car!

Sheila pointed out one of Scotland's Munros mountains, 3,169 ft high Ben More or Big Mountain that was once over 10,000 feet high before a volcano erupted. Sheila, definitely not a spring chicken, told us how she and her partner, a fellow double-decker bus driver on Mull, had planned to climb the island's highest mountain on the last day of April 2016 but a huge snowstorm delayed their ascent for two weeks. On what turned out to be that year's hottest day, they found themselves scrambling on all fours on the loose scree or rocks at the top of the mountain still in t-shirts at 6:30 and finally relaxing with a cup of tea!

We were remarkably lucky with the weather that day on Mull, especially when you consider it was described as "a place of cold, wet, windy winters and mild, wet, windy summers!"

Thomas Telford, the Scottish civil engineer, architect, and stonemason who has been described as 'the man who made travel possible,' was lauded for designing this bridge after so many coastal otters had been killed on the island's roads.

Sheila mentioned that Phil Collins, the drummer with the band Genesis, bought this house as he wanted a quiet retreat for his recording studio.

The longest peninsula on Mull was a great spot for otters to rinse their fur and eat fish.

Sheila related how retirees from south of the border, i.e. England, had bought this white house in Pennyghael, a small community in southwestern Mull, along the road to Bunessan. The home had once been a smithy before becoming the schoolhouse and finally a B&B.

Sheila said how lucky we were to see these shaggy Highland cattle as she rarely sees them on her cross-island bus rides. She joked the farmers liked to send their hair to 'America' for Donald Trump wigs!

It was a hoot watching the farmer on his motorcycle herding the cattle also known as hairy coos!

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Fionnphort was the only village we'd seen on the almost two-hour drive from Craignure. Sheila said 42 children attended the local primary or elementary school. High school students, though, had to take the 6:20 am bus every Monday to catch the ferry to Oban where they live in hostels during the week while in school on the mainland.

Sheila joked that there was obviously not a 'lot to do' on the island so many residents enjoyed participating in the annual scarecrow competition. This one had recently received the second-place prize.

Excited as we were to get on the ferry to the uninhabited and wildly scenic Isle of Staffa, we were sad saying goodbye to Sheila who had entertained us every step of the way from Craignure to the tiny ferry town.

Staffa, just six miles to the north, was only a 10-minute ferry ride away.

This was our first view of Staffa, described by travel writer Rick Steves as "a knob of rock draped with a vibrant green carpet of turf." The island was famous for its basalt columns, caves, and its summer colony of puffins.

I think this small cave the boatman pointed out was called MacKinnon's Cave.

Staffa's shoreline was covered with bizarre, mostly hexagonal columns that stuck up at various heights. It wasn't surprising, therefore, that the island's name came from the Old Norse word for 'stave' as the columns looked like building timbers. 

The columns reminded us immediately of the fantastic Giant's Causeway we'd toured a few weeks previously in Northern Ireland. Geologists have claimed these unusual formations were created by volcanic eruptions more than 60 million years ago. As the surface of the lava flow cooled, it contracted and crystallized into these columns. When the rock later settled and eroded, the columns broke off into many stair-like steps that now honeycombed Staffa.

After landing in a small cove, Steven and I immediately chose to hike to the top of the island rather than follow almost everyone else who wanted to explore the island's most famous cave right away.

Traipsing amid the heather on the spine of the island gave us spectacular views of the Isle of Skye located 60 miles away.

Thank goodness a strong gust of wind didn't blow me out to sea!

With a last look at the sea, we figured we'd better hightail it down to the shore to walk along the columns to the island's most famous sight, Fingal's Cave. 

Ben Gibbons, a fellow passenger on the tour, shared these photos of the adorable seal pups he managed to see on Staffa.

We were lucky we had the 'path' to the cave almost to ourselves so we could relish the columns' unusual beauty and, almost more importantly, take time to walk carefully on the uneven surfaces. Having the cable to hold onto for dear life as we walked along the ledge toward the cave gave me a welcome degree of security.

You can see from my wind-swept hair how it got chillier as we made our way along very carefully on the basalt columns to the cave. 

Once we stepped inside the gaping mouth of the cave and took in the amazing beauty of the floor-to-ceiling columns, it was a very powerful experience, all the more so as we had it to ourselves.  

The only experience that could possibly have made our all too brief hour on Staffa any better was if we'd been there in the summertime and then caught sight of the large colony of very tame Atlantic puffins who settle there until August to breed. If you are also lucky enough to make your way to Staffa sometime, perhaps you will spot the tuxedo-clad puffins and their pufflings. If you do, please make sure to send us a photo!

Next post: Onto the last Inner Hebrides island of Iona, the birthplace of Christianity in Scotland which deserves its own post.

Since Steven and I returned from our very abbreviated trip to Asia and the Middle East six weeks ago, I have been taking turns writing posts on our trip to the UK last fall at long last and also posts on our couple of weeks in Sri Lanka and India last month. Here's the link to my last post on the most important Buddhist site in Sri Lanka, the Temple of the Sacred Tooth, located in Kandy:
https://bergersadventures8.blogspot.com/2020/04/36-kandys-temple-of-sacred-tooth-relic.html

Posted finally on May 2, 2020, from our home in Denver after I inadvertently deleted this entire post and the next one yesterday after spending too many hours to count on them!