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Magic Mull

by Mike McNamee

As with previous articles on this topic we start with the geology. The shape and structure of the land is informed by its geological history and then what has happened in the intervening thousands of years. The geology of Mull is not for the faint-hearted; it has been described as "...the most complicated igneous centre as yet accorded detailed examination anywhere in the world..." Geological Survey of Scotland 1924.

Mull is 24 miles (N-S) by 26 miles (E-W) but the shape is complicated by the deeply indented sea lochs which, in the waist, cut the island coast-to-coast distance down to around eight miles. The hugely layered volcanic structure, with up to 20 stacked-up lava flows make for undulating and twisting roads and progress in any direction, by any mode of transport, is slow (and rewarding!). Almost every mile of road is single track with just a couple of stretches of two-way traffic in a couple of towns. By way of example, the route from Tobermory to Dervaig is a twisting snake, full of hidden summits and switch-backs. It takes around 45 minutes to over the eight miles in a camper van (or the local bus) and the section record for the Mull Car Rally is an amazing 8 minutes or so (at night!).

Mull is the third largest of the Hebridean islands, behind Skye and Lewis. It shares a small fragment of pre-Cambrian Lewisian gneiss with Lewis, but only on Iona, the island just off the Ross of Mull. Most of the geological complexity comes from the two volcanoes centred in the middle of the island. These erupted some 65 million years ago when Greenland moved away from Scotland and are part of a line of volcanic activity which stretches from Ailsa Craig in the south up through Arran, Ardnamurchan, Rum, Skye, then bearing westwards to St Kilda.

The glaciation of ice ages has planed down the landscape around the original, conical, volcanoes to form classic ring dykes.

The 20 or so outpourings of molten lava have created a stepped landscape (called 'trap' after the Swedish for step) of sills of hard rock topped by layers of softer larva to form a layer cake that runs right to the sea in places. This layering is further complicated by raised beaches, formed when cooling climates recaptured the water and locked it in to the polar ice caps leaving the coastline high, dry and rebounding upwards. The abbey of Iona is built on one such raised beach.

Weathering of the sills has produced the dramatic coastal scenery which is such a magnet for photographers (and sea eagles and otters!). It has also provided a severe test for access in many places. For example, the walk to the famous arches at Carsaig requires a white-knuckle car ride just to get to the car park. In our case this was not helped by the local kids sticking an additional numeral 'one' to the weight limit sign, conning us in to attempting the road in a camper van. A sump-scraping, hand-brake testing, clutch burning, seven-point turn on a 1:3 slope was required to extricate us and the walk was abandoned before we even saw the beach!

The various coastal terrains are duplicated on the fringes of the inland lochs, that is a gentle slope rolling into a precipitous cliff, based with a flat 'beach' area (although it is sometimes boulder strewn and tricky walking!). The trip around the northern shore of Loch Scridain is even more arduous than Carsaig and involves an 11-mile yomp which also includes a fixed iron ladder to descend towards the famous lava-fossilised tree. The trip along the northern shore at Calgary is far more within the capabilities of your limpy-legged editor but equally rewarding - you could potter for days taking pictures, disturbed only by the occasional eagle patrolling overhead.

The Wild Life

Mull is a magnet for animal watches of all persuasions. The seas are crystal clear with whales, dolphins, porpoises and seals in abundance. In the air you will find patrolling golden and sea eagles; indeed we saw so many golden eagles we gave up bothering to get the binoculars out! We did not see any sea eagles although there were many reports from other tourists and on the bulletin boards. Otters are the other delight of Mull and can be seen almost anywhere on the rocky coastlines. We watched a mother and two cubs playing off Penyghael for about 45 minutes.

The one iconic bird we did not see was the corncrake. Resident on Iona and in the fields around Fionnphort we heard them a lot but they are very elusive! You cannot miss their noisy cackling but need good directionfinding ears and a patient eye.

The puffins resident on Staffa are a great attraction. As soon as the tourists sit down on the grassy slopes on the north of the island the puffins come out, secure in the knowledge that the humans (and their dogs!) will keep the skua and other predators away. None of your big lens stuff required here, 100mm is plenty and sometimes you have to wait for them to move back a little! Those of us who have seen these pretty little birds are a bit blasé about them - not so the Japanese tourist we sat beside who was buzzing with excitement at her first look!

The Terrain

The roads of Mull make for slow driving with only a mile or two here and there being two-way. Passing places are located about every 100 yards or so and you soon get into the habit and etiquette of waiting for the busy locals to come blasting through (and this includes 40-seater buses who take the narrow roads at startling speed!). For the driver, the stop at a passing place is an opportunity to catch sight of the scenery for you have to concentrate really hard on aiming your vehicle along the narrow roadway between times. Places where you can stop and get out to take pictures are quite rare (especially in a camper van) and so you need to be prepared to walk a mile or two - one advantage of using a local guide is that they know every nook and cranny to slide a minibus into!

Care is needed on the remote walks. Way marking is sparse and with little or no mobile coverage you are on your own if you have an accident.

There is no mountain rescue on Mull either so if you get into serious trouble the wait might be long. For some of the routes a companion is an almost obligatory safety aid; map-reading skills and a steady head are also required in places.

We used the Cicerone Guide Walking on the Isle of Mull.

There are an abundant number of businesses to cater for your wildlife and photographic needs and you can see their minibuses buzzing about the hot spots on the island. We came by www.photomull.co.uk on our aborted visit to Carsaig Bay (we noted with a wry smile that he uses a Landrover!)

We also parked up next to Sam Jones' vehicle in Tobermory - she runs www.imagemull.co.uk. On our travels we stopped at Penyghael Post Office for a cup of tea with Joy Rains. Joy and her husband run www.wildaboutmull.co.uk although Joy mainly mans the Post Office with the best view in the country (and apparently does a daily photograph for her blog).

Erraid

The tidal island of Erraid lies off the coast at Fidden, Fionnphort, on the Ross of Mull. It was made famous by Robert Louis Stevenson who based his novel, Kidnapped, on the island, having spent time there (along with relatives) while building lighthouses using granite quarried on Erraid. The main character, David Balfour, is shipwrecked on the Torran Rocks and cast upon the shores of Erraid. His subsequent walk back to Edinburgh is now immortalised in a long-distance path which follows his journey.

Stevenson also built the row of houses on the island which face Fidden across the Sound and were used to house the lighthousemen from the local installations. This included the signalling station above the houses which used to communicate with the offshore lighthouses by Morse Code using either signalling mirrors or the 'new fangled' electric system. The lighthouse shore station was in operation until 1967 but the houses are now used by the Findhorn Trust as a self-reliant commune.

Port Uisken

Still sore from our catastrophic attempt on Carsaig Bay, we attempted the lesser challenge of Port Uisken, which is 15km to the west of Carsaig along the southern coast of Mull. That 15km represents about 500 million years of geological time. Carsaig is mixed Triassic, Jurassic, Cretaceous (ie dinosaur times ~650 million years ago!) while Uisken is Dalradian, 550-750 million years ago. The difference in the geology and the landscape? One you can get a camper van down, the other, not!

This, though, is another gorgeous bay which looks out to Jura and its Paps, 28 miles distant. Colonsay is 11 miles across the sea, a journey that the kayaker in the picture had his eye on! It's a small world - he turned out to be from the Wirral and knew Societies' member, Chris Phillips!

Calgary Bay

This bay has been described as the prettiest beach in the world and on a bright cloudless day who were we to argue! The name comes from the Gaelic, Cala ghearraidh, meaning Beach of the meadow (pasture). 'Cala' is the word specifically used for a hard, sandy beach suitable for landing a boat, which relates plausibly to the location. A small stone pier, originally built to allow 'puffers' (small steam-driven cargo boats) to deliver coal to the Mornish Estate, was also used to take sheep to and from grazing on the Treshnish Isles and gives a further possible reason for the name of the bay. We walked out to the headland taking in the spectacular granite intrusion, one of many dykes in the Hebrides. This again is a place where you could spend many hours making images.

Just up the hill from the pier the deserted village of Inivea remains as roofless stone ruins, an atmospheric relic of the Highland clearances. David Tennant (the former Tenth Doctor on Doctor Who) traced his family back to here in the BBC programme, Who do you think you are? Around 24 buildings of the township can be seen, several of them still standing to wall head level. These included houses and barns, with enclosures probably forming kailyards.

On the east side of the bay Calgary House, now called Calgary Castle, was built in 1817 extending an earlier Calgary Estate laird's house. Colonel James Macleod, Commissioner of the North-West Mounted Police, was a summer guest, in 1876 and, shortly after returning to Canada, he suggested its name for Fort Calgary. This gave rise to the city of Calgary, Alberta. Iona

The island of Iona is separated from Mull by the mile-wide Sound of Iona. It is a place of Christian pilgrimage reflecting the time in ad 563 when Columba came ashore with his 12 disciples. It is sacred ground and the resting place of 48 kings of Scotland including Macbeth. The Book of Kells was held on Iona, but taken away to Dublin to avoid the desecration of the Reformation, which also saw all but two of the 360 carved crosses destroyed. Today the much rebuilt and modernised Abbey stands proudly on the raised shoreline of Iona which attracts many thousands of visitors (130,000 per year

Staffa

No geologist could turn up the opportunity to visit Staffa and take in the scene which is almost universal in all books on volcanic landscape ever written! Made more famous by Mendelssohn's Fingal's Cave overture, the island has been visited by tourists for a century or more. It stands defiant against the Atlantic weather, about six miles off the coast, just to the north of Iona. It's columnar, fast-cooled granite is so well documented it needs no further introduction but it is nevertheless a crazy scene of structured order, topped off by a jumble of volcanic debris about 20m thick. Given that more than 2km of volcanic rock has been planed off by glaciers it is remarkable that this bottom-most layer (of about 20) has survived at all - a few more hundred years of ice would have seen it ground to dust!

Once the visitor has negotiated the pavement of hexagonal stepping stones aided by a wire handrail, they get into Fingal's Cave itself. The journey is a bit of a stroll on a dry summer day but might be more menacing with a bit sea running! After retracing your steps it's off to visit the puffins who live at the northern end of the island.

Staffa is presumed to have formed part of a larger island complex that includes Mull, Iona and the Treshnish islands, but now requires a boat journey which in turn provides employment for a number of crews.

There are a number of boats sailing to the Treshnish Islands and Staffa from Fionnphort/Iona and others from Tobermory.

From Iona you can take the romantic option and use the Birthe Marie, a gaff ketch rigged sailing boat. On the day we went to Iona she was on hire to a local photographer who was working from the pier and kindly provided a beautiful model for the sail past! Built as a fishing boat in Denmark in 1933, Birthe Marie fished, as far as is known, in the North Sea and the Baltic.

Originally she was built with a 'wet well' in the middle part of the boat which was flooded with seawater to keep the catch alive and fresh. For a full story on her six-year renovation see http://www.boattripsiona.com/historyboat.htm. magic mull

What's Left?

You should always leave a place with a few things not done so that you have an excuse for a return trip! An enduring theme of conversations we held with other tourists was that they had been returning to Mull for 10, 20 and in some cases 30 years!

This trip, then, was little more than a scoping exercise to see what was what. Photographic must-do's are to revisit Staffa and perhaps the Treshnish on the sailing boat, to find a way to get to both Carsaig Bay and the McCulloch fossilised tree, have a meal in Tobermory, revisit Iona and to use the Big Stopper - with flat calm and clear blue skies it never left its box.

The People of Mull

The population of Mull peaked in 1821 at 10,612. Since then it has declined to the present-day fairly stable level of around 2,000 (since 1961). Like the rest of the Highland region the population was decimated by the Clearances and what the factors failed to complete was finished off by the wind-blown disease that ravaged the potato crop and brought famine to the island in 1846. Mull is thus dotted with pathetic little rectangles of fallen building stones where people once scraped out an existence. 'Scraped' is a qualified word, the romantic notion of the sturdy Highlander tending his croft is a figment of Victorian imagination.

The reality was grinding poverty with famine never more than a few weeks of adverse weather away if it came at the wrong time in the growing season.

The clans-folk of Mull are Macleans and the Clearances scattered them across the world. There are conservatively 308,000 Maclean families in 132 countries around the world. Sir Fitzroy Maclean said in his book, The Isles of the Sea that the clan had its foundation first and foremost in the deeply rooted Celtic principle of kindness, a mixture of kinship and long tradition, stronger than any written law. As Macleans spread across the globe, the value of kinship is passed down through the generations. Wherever Macleans find themselves and their cousins, there is a distinct feeling of family and friendship, what Sir Fitzroy described as 'kindness.' The present-day distribution of Macleans is:
190,000 North America
56,000 Europe
27,000 Australasias

As with all clans the 'septs' carry a variety of names and if you look through the list it is obvious how many prominent public figures are descendents of Mull families. They have proven to be a resilient bunch with that 'can-do' attitude of islanders brought about by isolation and the need to survive in a harsh environment.

Are you from Mull?

Auchaneson, Beath, Beaton, Black, Clanachan, Dowart, Dowie, Duart, Duie, Garvie, Gillan, Gillon, Gilzean, Hoey, Huie, Lane, Lean, Leitch, MacBeath, MacBeth, MacBheath, MacCormick, MacEachan, Macfadin, MacFadyen, Macfadzean, Macfergan, Macgeachan, MacGilvra, Macildowie, Macilduy, Macilvera, MacLergain, Maclergan, MacPhaiden, MacRankin, MacVeagh, MacVey, Paden, Patten, Rankin, Rankine.

This scattering of the original population goes a long way to explaining the cruise ships that visit Iona Sound daily; many of the Americans, New Zealanders and Australians pouring up from the jetty are searching for their lost ancestry!

The Highland Clearances remain a disgraceful blot on English history, something we might well dwell upon as we view the current influx of refugees coming in the other direction from Syria. Also for any overseas readers who are puzzled by the intense rivalry at Scotland-England sporting events look no further than the Clearances, we Celts have long memories!!



Updated 27/04/2026 16:44:22 Last Modified: Monday, 27 April 2026