Last tuesday I went for a lovely walk and explore along the beach at Fionnport on the Isle of Mull, while waiting for a tour boat to go out to the island of Staffa.
We got there fairly early on tuesday morning and as such there was still a little sunrise colour in the sky which was quite nice.
Mull is quite a sparsely populated island, and Fionnport its quite tiny. Its where you catch the ferry service to the isle of Iona. We started the walk at the car park - the view above was taken from there looking inland, with the hills in the centre of Mull in the far distance.
We made our way to the ferry slip, where we were to catch the tour boat, which has this lovely beach next to it.
As we were early, I made may way down onto the beach for an explore - while my daughter and wife headed for the ferry terminal building. The rocks around the shore here are really interesting. The colours are quite amazing. The yellow is some form of lichen covering the rock parts that are normally above the water line.
The most intriguing feature down on the beach is this impressive large split boulder. I dont know if there is a story attached to this rock, but I've seen other similar split boulders in the highlands that were invariably split by giants or the devil (allegedly) !
Thats a view by the split boulder looking down to the ferry that takes you over to Iona. Thats Iona that you can see in the background - the ferry only take 5 mins to get over, and runs every half hour during the day.
Thats another view of these very colourful rocks. Again, the yellow part would normally always be above water, you can then see the change in colour coming down from the yellow to the parts that are often submerged where the dark brown seaweed is growing.
I also spotted the intriguing setup above in the rocks on the far side of the wee beach. Somehow this all managed to get balanced together. It looks pretty much staged and put there by human hands, although that top boulder was pretty big and was easily many tons in weight. Again you can see more lichens here on the rock, which indicate very good air quality - which is not a surprise considering the remoteness of this part of the island.
Coming back across the beach, there were a number of rock pools on the ferry side.
I then made my way to the old slipway which had a few old creels lying beside it on the shore. The tide was fairly low, and would normally come up to the creels and probably beyond - which you can tell by the line of seaweed.
Having checked out the old pier, I then went back to rejoin my wife and daughter.
The tour boat then turned up to take us to the isle of Staffa, which I covered in another post last week (here). I was glad I got the chance to walk along the shore while waiting for the ferry - it was lovely to see, and to catch some fresh air on this lovely October morning.
That wraps up my wednesday walk for another week - and I'm looking forward to reading through the other wed walk posts shared from around the world this week.
All the best from Scotland !
