Fingal's Cave, and the fine art of sailing past things

Read the itinerary of a cruise round the Scottish islands and you will find, between the ports, a series of lines that begin with "cruising by". Cruising by Fingal's Cave, Isle of Staffa. Cruising by Dutchman's Cap. Cruising past Duart Castle. Cruising Loch Hourn. It is tempting to treat these as filler, the bits of the day between breakfast and the next port. That would be a mistake. On a good day they are the best thing on the trip, and they show you parts of the Hebrides that most visitors never see, because there is no road to them and no harbour big enough for a ship to stop.

The trick is to be on deck. The ship will not wait, and a sail-by that lasts twenty minutes can be the reason you remember the whole voyage.

Staffa, and the cave that made a composer

Staffa is a small, uninhabited island off the west coast of Mull, and it looks as if it had been built rather than formed. Its cliffs are made of basalt columns, most of them six-sided, packed together like the cells of a honeycomb and standing upright from the sea, with a cap of rougher rock on top. They were formed some sixty million years ago, when lava cooled slowly and cracked into columns as it shrank, and they are part of the same ancient lava field as the Giant's Causeway on the Antrim coast. Irish and Scottish legend explains this rather differently, with a giant building a causeway across the sea.

At the south end of the island the sea has cut a cave deep into the columns. Its Gaelic name means something like the melodious cave, for the sound the waves make inside it; its English name, Fingal's Cave, comes from the hero of the Ossian poems, which were enormously fashionable in the late eighteenth century. The naturalist Joseph Banks landed on Staffa in 1772 and described it with such enthusiasm that it became a fixture of the Romantic tour. Wordsworth and Keats came. Turner painted it. Queen Victoria was rowed into the cave. And on his Scottish journey of 1829 the young Felix Mendelssohn sketched the opening bars of what became his Hebrides overture, then made the crossing to Staffa and was badly seasick. The overture has been reminding concert audiences of the sea off Mull ever since.

A cruise ship cannot land passengers on Staffa, but it can stand off the island, and from the water the columns are seen as the first visitors saw them, rising straight out of the sea. Nearby, in the Treshnish Isles, is Bac Mòr, the Dutchman's Cap, an island with a low brim and a high crown that looks exactly like its name.

Castles and sea lochs

Further south, the Sound of Mull is the channel between Mull and the mainland, and it is guarded at its eastern end by Duart Castle, on a rocky headland facing the open water. It has been the seat of the Macleans for centuries; it fell into ruin, and was bought back and restored by the clan chief in the early twentieth century. Seen from a ship's deck, it looks precisely as a Highland castle ought to look, which is perhaps why film-makers have been drawn to it.

North of Mull the coast breaks up into long sea lochs that run deep into the mountains. Loch Hourn is one of the most remote of them, reaching into Knoydart, a peninsula with no road connection to the rest of the mainland. The loch narrows between steep hills as it goes in, and on a still day the water holds the reflections of the slopes. It is the nearest thing Scotland has to a Norwegian fjord, and like a fjord it is best seen from the middle of the water. Westward lie the Small Isles, Rum, Eigg, Muck and Canna, each with its own character and its own tiny population, seen from a ship as a procession of shapes on the horizon: the dark mountains of Rum, the great prow of rock on Eigg.

Which sailing, and when

All of this depends on weather. Sail-bys are the first things to be dropped when the sea is rough or the visibility poor, and the captain's decision is final and usually wise. Summer gives the best odds, and the long evenings help: in June a sail-by at ten at night can still be in daylight.

Fred. Olsen's Wild Beauty of the Scottish Isles, seven nights from Newcastle on Bolette in August 2027, is the most concentrated version: Kirkwall, Portree on Skye and Stornoway on Lewis, with Loch Hourn, the Small Isles, Fingal's Cave and the Dutchman's Cap in between.

For a little longer, Scenic Islands and Highlands of Scotland, nine nights from Newcastle in September 2027, adds Invergordon, Lerwick and Ullapool to much the same run of sail-bys, and passes Duart Castle as well. From Southampton, the ten-night Scenic Summertime Scottish Isles in August 2027 covers the Sound of Mull, Duart and Staffa on its way round.

Take binoculars, a warm hat and a waterproof, and find out from the daily programme when each sail-by is expected. Then set an alarm, if necessary. Staffa has been giving people the same sensation since 1772, and it is not diminished in the slightest by the fact that you are seeing it from a ship.