Tucked away on a wild stretch of Skye coast is one of the strangest yet least known natural wonders in Scotland.
It’s a cave, but unlike most of the accessible caves in Scotland this one has some spectacular and beautiful rock formations inside it. I wish I had some photos to illustrate but, as you will shortly discover, I couldn’t get near them.
You’ll have to use your imagination I’m afraid, but just picture flowing rock waterfalls with stalactites and stalagmites and you’re most of the way there. I won’t go into the science of how they’re formed, rather I’ll save that for a time when I can actually access the cave.
It’s called the Spar Cave, not because it’s sponsored by a high street supermarket but because its walls are covered in ‘spars’, crystals with distinct faces, which are revealed under torch light. It was quite the happening tourist destination in the 19th Century, although the adventurous folk who ventured out here damaged the cave by removing the best stalactites and stalagmites, and blackened the roof with their oil lamps.
Despite all that, the remaining cavern and its formations are surreal and wonderful and all that kind of thing. Well worth the trek out to Strathaird to see, and certainly worth the effort of nipping in and out at low tide. Otherwise you might get stranded for 12 hours until you can get out again!
Anyway, I’d been meaning to visit the Spar Cave for years but had kind of forgotten about it. Then earlier this year the cave got greater publicity (albeit unnamed) when Bear Grylls took Ben Stiller there as part of their Skye adventure. It reminded me of a forgotten objective, and I promised myself I’d visit this year if possible.
And so, this month I found myself parked at the small settlement of Glasnakille, near Elgol, on what was apparently the first blue sky sunny day in this part of the world for weeks.
I headed off towards the coast, descending into a steep-sided inlet with abrasive limestone boulders scattered at its far end. The tide was out, and I was sooooo excited as I realised I was actually going to get to see the cave for myself.
At that moment a couple appeared from around the headland on my left, heading back up the inlet towards me.
“How’s the tide?”, I asked.
“Out”, replied the bloke. “But the cave is flooded. You can’t get inside it.”
My instant thought was that they’d simply tried to access the spar cave’s inlet while the tide was still going out, but he continued:
“You can get to it, and it’s still nice to see though”.
I thanked them and continued around to the next inlet, hoping that perhaps they were referring to the tide or that the water in the cave would be shallow, but also resisting the urge to feel despondent.
I rounded the headland the couple had appeared from behind and stood staring up the enormous chasm, at the end of which lay the entrance to the cave. True enough the tide was well out.
The inlet presented itself as a long cleft in the coastline some 50m long, with walls 15m high. It was impressive. Much more impressive than it had looked in the photos I’d seen. Not that they were unimpressive by any means, it’s just that standing there in person was infinitely better than seeing someone’s photo. And it was quite immense.
I could see the remains of the 6ft wall at the very end of the inlet, which was apparently built by the then landowner, Alexander MacAllister, to deter casual (ie unpaid) visitors to the cave. Sir Walter Scott was one such casual visitor although it didn’t deter him when he visited in 1814, as he apparently used a rope to scale the wall and gain access to the cave.
I gingerly crossed the field of boulders, made decidedly dicey by the slippy seaweed covering them, and walked up the inlet towards the cave entrance.
Water poured from above in fine trickles. The walls were sopping and it was much cooler in here. It had the feel of somewhere a bit out of the ordinary, but also a bit oppressive. After all, if the tide comes in and you get trapped in the inlet, there’s no way out.
As I reached the cave entrance the sound of the sea, so dominant and audible just half way up the inlet, had now been drowned out by the sound of falling, running and dripping water. It fell in drips from some places, in steady flows from others, and in absolute torrents from a few more.
Little wonder, with so much water falling from above, that the cave was flooded. The water was plain to see from the entrance, and it was perhaps six inches deep. What wasn’t clear though, was how far into the cave the flood went. I unpacked my brightest torch and shone it up the cave.
I could see perhaps 20m into the cave to the point where it veered right, and I thought I could see the start of the famous flowstone staircase, a steep staircase of smooth calcite deposits.
I’d come this far, I’d waited this long, and I wasn’t about to give up just yet. Seized by the urge to explore further I removed by boots & socks, tied them around my shoulders, rolled up my trousers and edged barefoot into the cave. It goes without saying that the water was cold.
I got perhaps five metres inside, onto a dry ledge raised above the waterline. I shone my torch again.
Yep, it was definitely flooded all the way to the staircase. I would have happily pressed on if it was just six inches of water, but now I was actually in the cave I could see that from this point onwards the water was between two and three feet deep.
Damn!
As usual when I’m faced with a collapsing plan, I just stood there for a few minutes as the cogs turned in my head, processing the situation and taking it all in. Obviously I’d have to turn back, and by that point I’d thought better of the wading barefoot idea anyway. Who knows what folk had left in the cave for me to stand on. Indeed once I’d got back out and had got my boots back on, I noticed old pieces of crockery, rusty metal, glass. Hmm.
All was not lost, however. While I was standing partly submerged, I eventually thought to shine my torch upwards. There mightn’t have been sparkling crystals or any of the beautiful calcite formations but the sheer size of the place was impressive to behold.
It was narrow, perhaps only three metres across, but it was cavernous in its reach upwards. Like a church. I stood there for a while, listening to the incessant sound of water all around me, my feet enjoying a mineral spa in a spar cave, and was genuinely happy to be there.
I headed out of the dim, sodden chasm and picked my way back over the seaweed:
In the cleft, in the shadows, it was clearly still a winter’s day and given its oppressive feel I confess I was more than happy to step back out into the bright sunlight.
I rounded the headland and plonked myself down on an outrageously abrasive boulder. There I sat for the best part of an hour, just watching the waves gently pushing inland, listening to the sea, munching caramel shortbread and watching shags and ravens doing slow leisurely fly-bys along the coast.
It was really lovely and a worthy place to be in its own right, but after such a long wait to visit the cave I was obviously disappointed.
But......I remained philosophical about the whole thing. This wasn’t the first time I’d had to turn back from an objective and it certainly wouldn’t be the last. And that’s okay, because I genuinely believe it’s good & healthy to be sent packing every now & then.
These days when we know everything about everything, we feel we can control the world around us. I suppose an illustration of that point is the information I was able to glean online in advance of my caving exploits. I was able to find out where the cave was, what I should expect when I got there, I was reminded to take a couple of torches and I was able to find out when low tide was expected to be. I intended to film a video blog from the interior of the cave, so I also packed all my camera gear, a tripod, and read up on the cave’s history so that I could give some background information about it.
But it was all for nowt, because for the previous three days it had done nothing but rain. Almost 200mm was recorded in some parts of the Highlands over 48 hours, an incredible volume of water running off the hills and down to the sea. And yet it never occurred to me that it might have an impact upon this cave. None of the accounts I’d read concerning the cave mentioned anything about flooding. It was all about the tide.
At the end of the day, nobody can control Skye’s famous weather, and it’s nice to be reminded that we can’t control everything, try as we might. It’s good to encounter parts of the natural world that don’t dance when we want them to. That could be a wildlife spectacle that never shows up, an eclipse or meteor shower obscured by cloud, bad weather beating you back from a hill or, in this case, a flooded cave. It just makes the experience all the more rewarding when all the variables finally do align, and allow you the privilege of seeing whatever it is you’ve been trying to see.
I also couldn’t help feel that the flood was Skye’s way of telling me I should be outside in the sunshine, not ferreting around in the darkness. It was as though it knew there would be one decent sunny day that week, and it pulled out all the stops to make sure I spent that day outside rather than in, and got to see the stunning Strathaird landscape in sublime spring-like conditions.
And so I did! I sat on the beach at Elgol:
....and walked in to Camasunary:
Yes yes, it’s bonkers egotism on my part to believe that two days of torrential rain was all orchestrated purely for my benefit, but the idea had a nice sense of balance and logic to it and I was happy to indulge the delusion. Ultimately for me, it simply means I will have to return to the Isle of Skye again in the future, and that’s no bad thing.
