Cave

Cave

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.