Staffa – the world-famous island off Mull

Banks, who accompanied Captain Cook on his epic voyage to Australia in 1768-71, mistakenly thought ‘Bhinn’ (pronounced Finn) was an abbreviation of Fingal, who is credited with building a causeway between Ireland and Scotland. The name stuck! 

Banks was so overwhelmed by what he saw that he wrote: “Staffa, which is reckoned one of the greatest natural curiosities in the world, is surrounded by many pillars of different shapes, such as pentagons, octagons, etc.

"There is a cave on the island; the whole sides are solid rock, and the bottom is covered with water 12 feet deep. The Giant’s Causeway in Ireland, or Stonehenge in England, are but trifles when compared to this island.”

Almost overnight Staffa became one of the most popular visitor destinations in the world. Hot on the heels of Banks came Faujas de St Fond (a noted French geologist), then Sir Walter Scott, who made two trips to Staffa in 1810 and 1814.

After Scott, in the list of famous visitors, came the 20-year-old Felix Mendelssohn, who arrived on August 7, 1829 on the paddle steamer ‘The Highlander’, along with his friend the celebrated German author Ernst Klingemann. Despite being violently seasick on the way from Oban, the sight and sound of the Atlantic making weird echoes in the Cave inspired Mendelssohn to write his Hebrides Overture Opus 26, commonly known as Fingal’s Cave.

Other 19th-century celebrities followed including  Queen Victoria – accompanied by Prince Albert, the Princess Royal and the young Prince of Wales (later King Edward V11) – J M W Turner, John Keats, William Wordsworth, Alfred Lord Tennyson, Jules Verne, Robert Louis Stevenson and David Livingstone, the missionary and explorer whose grandfather had lived in Morvern on the nearby Island of Ulva.

Although no one now lives on Staffa, it was not always so. When Sir Joseph Banks landed in 1772 there was only one occupant – a herdsman who invited him to spend the night in his little house. Leaving his companions in a tent, Banks agreed but regretted it because not only did his host keep him awake all night singing songs in Gaelic, which he could not understand, but on wakening in the morning discovered that he had acquired lice.

When Banks mentioned this to his indignant host, the herdsman, who evidently spoke some English, told him he must have brought them with him and that he should have left them in England from whence he had come!
In 1784 Faujas de Saint-Fond, the French geologist, found two families with eight cows, a bull, 12 sheep, two horses, a pig, two dogs, a cockerel and eight hens on the island.

Staffa is now owned by The National Trust for Scotland, said to be only the ninth owner since records began.
It was bought in April 1986 by the late Jock Elliott, philanthropist and chairman of Ogilvy & Mather, New York’s renowned international advertising agency, as an imaginative gift for his wife’s 60th birthday. Two days later Elly Elliott donated the island to the trust and, in return, was given the honorary title of ‘Stewardess of Staffa’ for life.