Puffins Galore!
The last time we were at Fionnphort (pronounced Finfort) we sat in the car whilst the rain lashed down outside and across the short stretch of dark, grey water, the abbey on Iona was just a looming silhouette in the gloom. Today, thankfully, we seem to be in an alternate Scottish universe where the skies are blue and the sun is shining! A perfect day for our ‘Three Isles Tour’ (visiting Mull, Staffa and Iona) courtesy of West Coast Tours.
We booked this tour a long time before we set out on our Scotland and Northumberland trip and the main reason I booked it was to get to Iona for the first time and enjoy a boat trip out to Staffa. I didn’t really think about seeing Puffins. It wasn’t until a few days before that I suddenly figured out that spring through to August is when these adorable birds take up residence on some of the islands lying along our shores like the Farne Islands in Northumberland and indeed Staffa in Scotland. In Oban, the night before the tour, our waitress at Coast (a nice little family restaurant and a good choice for dinner if you are ever staying in Oban) assured us that we would definitely see puffins. Diners had been coming in all week saying they had seen plenty of them on their Staffa visits so apparently we were odds on to get a good sighting.
So, as we set off across to Mull the next morning I was full of hope that I would get a good view of one of the most recognised and loved birds on the planet. On Mull, a coach took us down to Fionnphort where we then crammed on to a Staffa Tours boat to make the trip out to Staffa.
Staffa is mainly famous not for the puffins but for its rock formation and cave. It is a geological island sister to the Giants Causeway in Northern Ireland and of course the similarity in rock formation has its own creation myth where the Irish hero Fingal traded blows with the Scottish giant Benandonner after a causeway had been created between Staffa and Ireland. Benandonner eventually was bested by Fingal and retreated to his cave on Staffa but the said same cave has now been immortalised as Fingal’s not Benandonner’s cave. I guess it’s another case of history always being written by the victors!
As we came in to dock on Staffa, the strains of Mendelssohn’s Hebrides Overture echoing round on loop in my head, we were told that we had around an hour to enjoy the island with an opportunity to go along a narrow rock hugging walkway to take a peek in Fingal’s Cave and/or take the steep winding steps up to the grassy top of the domed island and search out the puffins. Howard and I looked at each other and with barely a hesitation we said ‘Sod Fingal, let’s go find those puffins!!’
Rarely has an hour passed by so quickly. We were totally captivated by these fantastic birds who provide endless free entertainment as they clumsily come in to land with bright orange feet splayed out in front of them. Great at fishing and not so great at flying. I want to shout ‘Incoming!’ as yet another one half crashes into the grass just a few metres away from where I sit watching with a stupid grin on my face. There are hundreds of them here and as we humans keep the dreaded gannet predators away, they’re quite happy to do their thing so close to us and certainly don’t feel precious about their space. I was never much of a bird fan until I did a trip to Costa Rica a few years ago where there is some simply amazing birdlife which totally won me over to our feathered friends. I have to say though that no other bird has brought me so much simple joy as the little plump puffin!
All too soon it was time to get back on the boat and our last island hop was to Iona. This is often described as the place where the christian faith first came to Scotland when St Columba and his small band of followers came there in 563AD. Today the faith of those first monks lives on in the Iona community at the abbey which now stands on the site of St Columba’s first church. The community welcomes many people to the island to join with them in their worship. Thousands of others come to Iona every year to spend perhaps, like us, just a couple of hours on the island enjoying the peace that it offers and the sense of a connection to the simple, loving faith together with its strong ties to the natural world that lies at the heart of the Celtic Christianity that St Columba brought to these shores.
As we headed back to the mainland, feeling a little wind and sunburnt from being out on the water and the islands all day, I felt a sense of warm contentment. In those lovely little black and orange birds and in the meditative tranquillity of Iona we had really experienced the fullness of life and that brings the best thing of all – a wonderful smiling, happy memory.
