Loch Spelve facts for kids
Loch Spelve is a beautiful sea loch located on the southeast coast of the Isle of Mull in Scotland. A sea loch is like a long, narrow arm of the sea that reaches inland. Loch Spelve is almost completely surrounded by land, with only a small opening connecting it to the wider Firth of Lorn. This makes it a very sheltered and calm place.
Exploring Loch Spelve
The A849 road runs along the northern side of Loch Spelve. A smaller road also goes south from it, winding around the western arm of the loch through a place called Kinlochspelve. This road continues as far as the small village of Croggan.
Natural Wonders
One cool feature you can see around Loch Spelve are raised beaches. These are old beach areas that are now higher than the current sea level. They show how the land has slowly risen over thousands of years! You can see them especially well near the narrow opening to the Firth of Lorn.
The loch also has a few rocky islands. The biggest one is called Eilean Amalaig. On this island, you can find the old ruins of a castle, which is pretty exciting to imagine!
Traces of the Ice Age
At Kinlochspelve, there's a special landform called a terminal moraine. This is a ridge of rocks and dirt left behind by a glacier during the last ice age. It's like a giant pile of debris that the glacier pushed along before it melted. It shows us where the glacier stopped moving.
Rocks and Geology
The southern and eastern shores of Loch Spelve are made from basalt lava flows. These rocks formed a very long time ago, during a period called the Palaeogene era. This was about 66 to 23 million years ago! These lava flows have many dolerite dykes cutting through them. Dykes are like walls of rock that formed when molten rock squeezed into cracks in older rocks and then cooled.
The northern and western shores are made of different rocks. These include granophyres and Triassic sandstones. The Triassic period was even older, about 252 to 201 million years ago! These sandstones also have special olivine-dolerite cone sheets inside them. These cone sheets are also formed from cooled molten rock and are linked to the ancient volcanic activity from the Palaeogene era.
Even though you can't see it on the surface, a very famous geological feature called the Great Glen Fault is believed to run underneath Loch Spelve and the nearby Loch Buie. A fault is a large crack in the Earth's crust where rocks have moved past each other.
