However, it was only when German composer Felix Mendelssohn visited the natural wonder that the cave really rocketed to fame. His verse describing the cave to his sister went as follows: “In order to make you understand how extraordinarily the Hebrides affected me, I send you the following, which came into my head there.”

Mendelssohn’s love of Fingal’s Cave quickly spread across Europe, assisted by artist J. M. W. Turner’s painting “Staffa, Fingal’s Cave” that same year. According to Atlas Obscura, William Wordsworth, John Keats, Lord Tennyson, and Queen Victoria all visited the cave, as well as adventurer-turned-author Jules Verne who used it in his book The Green Ray, and mentions it in the novels Journey to the Center of the Earth and The Mysterious Island.

Some 100 years later, British rock group Pink Floyd named one of their early, unreleased songs after the cave (an instrumental written for the film Zabriskie Point but not used). Nowadays, individuals can visit the cave on a cruise (although boats cannot enter the cave) or visitors can travel to the small island of Staffa and hike into the cave.