Ulva Ferry

A really good day. We drove down to Salen and across the island to Ulva Ferry and caught our boat trip to Iona and Staffa. We had a couple of hours on Iona, which gave us time to do the standard tourist circuit: the nunnery ruins, the ancient graveyard where Macbeth and others ended up, the Abbey, the beach by the ferry landing, the wool shop and tea and banana bread in the garden of the Heritage Centre. It's a beautiful, peaceful island - you can somehow feel the weight of the ages of spiritual life that has been lived there. Then it was on to Staffa where we landed long enough to walk across the rocks and into Fingal's Cave and to climb to the cairn at the top of the island. The huge columns of black basalt that form the central exposed layer of the rock of Staffa, visible at it's coastline, have been pushed together into a honeycomb and then twisted and broken by time and tide. Fingal's Cave itself is as awesome as it's reputation promises, even if the narrow and precipitous handrailed walkway across to it was a bit off-putting to those of us of a nervous disposition, height-and-edge-wise. A long day out and, tired from the sea air, we felt totally justified in treating ourselves to fish and chips for tea again!