Fingal's Cave Fingal's Cave Fingal's Cave is a sea cave on the uninhabited island of Staffa, in the Inner Hebrides of Scotland, known for its natural acoustics. The National Trust for Scotland owns the cave as part of a National Nature Reserve. It became known as Fingal's Cave after the eponymous hero of an epic poem by 18th-century Scots poet-historian James Macpherson. Fingal's Cave is formed entirely from hexagonally jointed basalt columns within a Paleocene lava flow, similar in structure to the Giant's Causeway in Northern Ireland and those of nearby Ulva. In all these cases, cooling on the upper and lower
Cave of the Mounds National Park Service designated the cave as a National Natural Landmark. The limestone from which the cave was carved began forming approximately 488 million years ago, during the Ordovician Period. During this time, much of North America was covered with warm, shallow seas. Over millions of years, calcium carbonate shells from tiny marine organisms accumulated on the sea floor, forming enormous quantities of limestone. The type of limestone in which the cave was formed is called galena dolomite because of its high concentration of the lead ore galena. The cave began forming about a million to a million and a