Four granite pillars rise from the North Atlantic about a kilometre off the Shetland coast. They have no inhabitants, no practical use, and no plans to go anywhere. But they are, in a word, magnificent.
These are The Drongs — and they have been earning their keep as a spectacle for a rather long time.
The surrounding landscape of Eshaness was, hundreds of millions of years ago, a stratovolcano with multiple eruptions creating a steep and unstable cone. The softer rocks — schists and gneiss — were worn away by millennia of Atlantic weather. The Drongs were carved by the sea from the harder granite that formed deep in the earth and simply refused to budge. Stubbornness, it turns out, is a geological virtue.
They have confused people for centuries. Depending on the angle, they resemble a ship under sail, a group of castle towers, or a cowled monk. Visitors have never quite agreed on what they are looking at.
Someone got there before the first climbers — probably. In 1992, Mick Fowler, Andy Nisbet, Jon Lincoln and Craig Jones climbed all four main stacks within seven days, and found signs suggesting others may have done so before them. But what signs seem to have been kept to themselves. So who those earlier visitors were remains entirely unknown.
The Drongs have been standing there for an almost incomprehensible stretch of time. They will almost certainly outlast the mystery.
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