scotland travel tips and stories. Vacations ideas, cruises spa and resorts

The small island of Staffa (off the west coast of Scotland) is famed for its magnificent and unusual black basalt rock formations. The island’s pillars with their geometric forms were formed by a huge volcanic eruption during the Tertiary Era about 70 million years ago and this is the result of a unique lava cooling process. Today the island is uninhabited and is a National Nature Reserve, where kittiwakes, razorbills, grey seals, basking sharks and dolphins make their home.

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The Faroes are a group of 18 hauntingly beautiful islands, situated between Iceland and Norway. The archipelago covers a total area of 1,399 sq km and has a gentle warmed by the Gulf Stream. The scenery is amazing, rugged mountains up to 880 m high are thickly carpeted with impossibly green grass, incised everywhere by waterfalls, rivers and fjords. Extraordinary skies constantly transform the landscape. Photo by: hlemmur
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Lying halfway between the Orkneys and The Shetlands, Fair Isle is a tiny isolated island, with a population of about 70 souls. Just 4.8 km long and 2.4 km wide, it is probably the windiest of the British Isles. The island is part of the National Trust for Scotland and is a paradise for birds, ornithologists and twitchers, and each year hundred of birders flock there. Photo by: billynxn
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Way out in the Atlantic Ocean, some 66 km to the west of the Outer Hebrides, rises the Kilda Archipelago, with the exception of Rockall, the westernmost of British islands. St Kilda belongs to the National Trust for Scotland, and is a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
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The island of Iona lies just to the southwest of Mull, Scotland and is small at 5 km long and about 1.6 km wide. Emerged as the ‘Cradle of Christianity‘, this may have been a Druidic centre even before the arrival in 563 AD. The main village and ferry port, Baile Mor, is a moment away from the pink granite ruins of the convent, while a little further on sands the 15th century Maclean’s Cross. The street of the Dead, leading to the abbey itself, is a 13th century, red grainite street, along which Scottish kings were carried from burial. Photo by: JC Richardson
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Skye is an island best known of all the Scottish islands, which is about 80 km from top to bottom, and has a great many things going for it, not at least the most breathtaking beautiful scenery, Ever since the Victorians discovered the joys of climbing spectacular Cuillin Ridge, the island has attracted more and more tourists and this, in the summer months, together with its notoriously changeable climate, is its only downside. Photo by: iancowe
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Lewis and Haris, surprisingly is one single island, the largest and the most northerly of Western Isles, otherwise known as the Outer Hebrides. The largest part of the island is Lewis to the north, which becomes Harris at the point where two sea lochs, Resort and Seaforth. Harris in turn is also situated between north and south by a narrow isthmus, again formed by two sea lochs. Photo by: -JM-
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