The Singing Sands of Eigg

Camas Sgiotaig, Isle of Eigg, Scotland

The white quartz beach at Eigg sings — a rising musical note produced when you walk or drag your feet through the dry sand. Islanders say the sound is the voice of the dead, singing from below the ground.

The Singing Sands at Camas Sgiotaig on the Isle of Eigg are a documented geological phenomenon: the white quartz grains are so uniformly rounded and dry that friction between them produces an audible musical tone. The pitch and intensity vary with pressure and moisture. On a dry summer day, a person walking across the beach produces a clearly musical sound with each step. The scientific explanation does not, in this case, suppress the folklore. The islanders of Eigg were aware of the acoustic property long before any geologist explained it, and their interpretation of it was embedded in the island's own history. Eigg has the site of the Massacre Cave — Uamh Fhraing — where in 1577 all the MacDonalds of Eigg, some 395 people, were suffocated in a single night when the MacLeods of Dunvegan lit a fire at the cave's entrance in retaliation for an insult. Almost the entire population of the island died. The singing sands are a short walk from this cave. The island tradition is that the sound of the sand is the collective voice of the dead — not in a mournful or threatening register, but singing. That they were so numerous and their death so sudden that the island itself absorbed them and gives them expression through its most unusual natural feature. Visitors who do not know either the geological explanation or the history report finding the sound deeply affecting: not frightening, but ancient, and somehow purposeful.