A colossal eddy that looks as if someone has just pulled the plug on the seas surrounding the Inner Hebrides, the Corryvreckan whirlpool is a freak of nature that spawns like a poisonous toad on a rising tide between the islands of Jura and Scarba.
From the Norse king Breacan – who, legend has it, drowned in the whirlpool after trying to impress a local princess – to George Orwell’s entanglement with it in 1947 while he was living on Jura writing Nineteen Eighty-Four, the whirlpool holds a distinctive place in Scottish culture.
The nature writer Roger Deakin considered attempting to swim across the Gulf of Corryvreckan (the strait between the two islands) when he was writing his classic work . Approaching it on Jura, he describes in the book how he could hear the maelstrom before he saw it, sounding like “a low-pitched, continuous seething of brawling waves”. It was 300 metres offshore, and within its circumference was a “mêlée of struggling white breakers… headbutting one another”.
