Qualla: Bass Rock

Bass Rock: Introduction

Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Original uploader was Brendandh at en.wikipedia, CC BY 2.5. From the mainland the rock looks white. That whiteness is not snow or rock colour. It is tens of thousands of northern gannets and their droppings, painting a 340-million-year-old volcanic plug with the residue of one of the world's largest seabird colonies. The species took its scientific name, Morus bassanus, from this single island, two miles off the East Lothian coast. David Attenborough has called the Bass one of the wildlife wonders of the world. Before it was that, it was a hermit's cell, a baron's stronghold, a king's offshore boarding-house for political prisoners, and a Jacobite fortress that held out against William III's navy for nearly three years.

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Image: Original uploader was Brendandh at en.wikipedia | CC BY 2.5

Bass Rock: Geology First

Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Lisa Jarvis, CC BY-SA 2.0. The Bass is a phonolitic trachyte plug of Carboniferous age. It is what remains of a volcano that erupted in the Dinantian, roughly 340 million years ago, when the rest of Scotland was somewhere near the equator. James Hutton, the Edinburgh geologist who founded modern geology in...

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Image: Lisa Jarvis | CC BY-SA 2.0

Bass Rock: Saint Baldred's Cell

Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Mike Pennington, CC BY-SA 2.0. An 8th-century Christian hermit named Baldred is said to have lived in a cell or cave halfway up the south face of the rock. Halfway up that same face still stands the ruin of a chapel dedicated to him, rebuilt several times by the Lauder family who held the Bass for almost six c...

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Image: Mike Pennington | CC BY-SA 2.0

Bass Rock: The Patmos of Scotland

Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Honge (talk), CC BY-SA 3.0. After the Restoration, when Charles II's government tried to force episcopacy on Presbyterian Scotland, the Bass became a state prison for Covenanters, the Presbyterian field preachers and their supporters. From 1671 onwards, men were brought here in irons and held in the castle ...

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Image: Honge (talk) | CC BY-SA 3.0

Bass Rock: The Jacobite Holdout

Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit The original uploader was David Lauder at English Wikipedia., CC BY-SA 3.0. In 1689, when William III's government took over the country after the Glorious Revolution, four Catholic Jacobite officers were imprisoned in the same castle that had once held the Covenanters. On 18 June 1691 they made their move. The garrison was outside the walls, working a c...

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Image: The original uploader was David Lauder at English Wikipedia. | CC BY-SA 3.0

Bass Rock: The Gannetry

Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Francis C. Franklin, CC BY-SA 4.0. The Lauders sold up to Sir Hew Dalrymple, Lord North Berwick, in 1706. His descendants still own the rock. The castle keep came down in 1902 to provide stone for David Stevenson's new lighthouse. What endured was the bird colony. By the 19th century around two thousand young gann...

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Image: Francis C. Franklin | CC BY-SA 4.0