Torran Rocks

The Torran Rocks are a scattered group of small islands and skerries lying between Mull and Colonsay in Argyll and Bute. They cover about twenty-five square kilometres roughly three kilometres south of the tidal island of Erraid and the Ross of Mull. The largest islets rise up to ten metres above sea level and stretch up to one hundred and fifty metres long. West Reef is made of half a dozen skerries of orthogneiss about two kilometres west of Na Torrain. The southern group and Ruadh Sgeir are formed from potassium-feldspar-phyric monzogranite intruded towards the end of the Caledonian orogeny. Between 1800 and 1854 thirty ships were wrecked on the Torrans with the loss of over fifty lives. In a single storm on 30–31 December 1865 twenty-four vessels were lost. Hamish Haswell-Smith describes the rocks as scattered like dragon’s teeth, lurking just beneath the surface. Nicholson calls them four and a half miles of jumbled granite teeth that claimed untold numbers of vessels plying between America or the Baltic ports and Oban. The Torran Rocks appear in Robert Louis Stevenson’s novel Kidnapped. In the story Alan Breck Stewart and David Balfour are shipwrecked in this ‘stoneyard’. Stevenson’s father designed the Dubh Artach lighthouse, and the young author knew the area well. From the deck of Iona steamers visitors can still see several kilometres of ocean thick with these fatal rocks. The sea breaks white and heavy over some while others show their dark heads threateningly above water.