Ceud mile failte gu Diuranais

DURNESS
Highlands of Scotland

 A hundred thousand welcomes to Durness

 

SMOO CAVE 

360 degree View of outside Smoo cave and 360 Inside Smoo cave

This easily accessible cave has the largest entrance of any sea cave in the British Isles. Its vast interior is floodlit and the innermost depths can be explored by boat. Long used by local inhabitants, recent excavations show that the cave was in use 6000 years ago by the earliest settlers in the north.

 

The cave is approached by a steep track down to the inlet where the sea water meets the river after flowing from the fall through two chambers of the cave. The cave opens as a large cavern in the lime stone cliffs over sixty metres long, forty metres wide and an entrance arch over fifteen metres high. 

The word Smoo is a Norse word "Sumvya" meaning creek or cleft. Smoo Cave, the largest opening of limestone cave in Britain, lies east of Durness village, at the end of an eight hundred meter sea inlet; Geodha Smoo. Here the Smoo burn Allt Smoo drops nearly 25 meters into the second chamber down a vertical shaft, the Falis Smoo or chimney Smoo as the as the sink hole in the roof is called. The burn cascades into a deep pool with a depth of around eight meters. After heavy rain, the Allt Smoo is changed into a raging torrent that crashes into the underground lochan with a gigantic roar. 

The "blow hole" and waterfall can be observed from an observation point above the cave. The cave is approached by a steep track down to the inlet where the burn meets the sea. The huge entrance, more than 15 meters high leads into the first chamber which is more than 60 meters long and 40 meters wide. The second chamber, containing the waterfall, is about 21 meters by 9 meters and can be viewed from a specially constructed platform, the third chamber is accessible only by a small boat.

There are vague stories, likely based on some fact, of the cave being a smugglers' hideaway and linked with tales of the supernatural. Among the many local legends surrounding the cave is that of the feared highway man McMurdo. Legend has it that during the sixteen century, McMurdo murdered his victims by throwing them down the blowhole into the cave. You can still see McMurdo’s tomb at Balnakeil Church which overlooks nearby Balnakeil Bay.

Smoo Cave is a very large sea cave, but the rear part is a karst cave which formed inside limestones of the Durness Group. The presence of caves in the vicinity of the Geodha Smoo, and indeed the presence of the Geodha itself, is a reflection of the character of the local geology, which is dominated by Cambrian Dumess Limestone. Smoo Cave was formed over many thousands of years, carved along the line of a weak fault, both by the river which today flows through It and by the sea, which at times of high tide still laps the back wall of the cave. The Inlet itself was created as the cave roof progressively collapsed with the deepening of the cavern (Gleed-0wen 1992).

For more information visit www.smoocave.org


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