Atlantic storm waves have carved an amphitheatre into volcanic rock and piled huge boulders into a storm beach high above the sea.
The headland of the Grind o' da Navir is formed from a volcanic rock called ignimbrite. This distinctive red rock was created from pyroclastic flows - searingly hot clouds of gas, blobs of molten lava and fragments of pumice that swept down the side of the Eshaness volcano in countless eruptions 395 million years ago. The flow would have travelled at over 100 kilometres an hour.
When the clouds settled as a layer several metres thick, the particles welded together and the lava droplets were squashed into candle-flame shapes or ‘fiammé’. If you look closely you can make out the individual drops.
Today water plays a bigger role here than fire. The Vikings named it Grind o da Navir - Gateway of the Borer - with good reason. Two bastions of cliff stand above a sea-cut amphitheatre framing a grind (or gateway) to the Atlantic below.
During violent storms, waves are driven through the grind, tearing huge blocks from the bedrock and hurling them inland to form ridges or ‘storm beaches’. Much of the rock at the Grind o’ da Navir is coloured black by lichen but clean rock faces reveal the places where rock has recently been torn away.
