The Dog Stone

The Dog Stone, Clach a' Choin in Gaelic, is a stranded sea stack standing in the trees just south of Dunollie Castle, on the coast road out of Oban. It's made of conglomerate, a pudding-stone of rounded pebbles cemented together around 415 million years ago, and it once stood in open water, carved into a column by the waves. When the ice sheets melted, the land, freed of all that weight, slowly rose, lifting the stack clear of the sea. The Victorian geologist Hugh Miller cited it as evidence that Scotland's coastline had risen since the Ice Age, and it remains a textbook site for the subject.

The better story is the older one. Fingal, the giant warrior of Celtic legend, Fionn mac Cumhaill to the Irish, is said to have tethered his enormous hound Bran to the stone whenever he went hunting in the Hebrides. Bran strained so hard at his leash that he wore the base of the stack thin, which is exactly how it looks: narrower at the bottom, as if something huge has been circling it for centuries. On stormy nights, they say, you can still hear him howling. Either explanation is a good one.