We heard a weird bang and the glasses and plates in the dresser started rattling.
An earthquake has struck the Isle of Mull in the Inner Hebrides. The British Geological Survey (BGS) said the 3.3 magnitude quake hit at 7.30pm on Monday.
It said movement was felt on Mull itself, on surrounding islands and on the mainland, mainly from within around 50km of the epicentre.
Mull resident Alasdair Satchel, 45, said he thought a car had crashed into his home when the earthquake struck. “I was sitting at my desk about 7.30pm last night and heard a very big bang, then another very big bang and the house shook,” the film, theatre and podcast maker told the PA news agency.
Rumbling
“We live in a wooden house and the whole house was just shaking. It made absolutely no sense. I went outside to see what happened as my wife had been taking my father-in-law home to the house, but he lives just down from us and it was icy outside, and I wondered if the car had slipped and hit the house. It was a very unusual experience, but brought a lot of people together in a very quick and unexpected way.”
Tiree resident and civil servant Richard Cooke, 35, told PA he was getting ready for dinner when he “felt the room shake. I thought it was a plane at first as we live near the airport,” he said.
Reports described people saying “the whole house creaked”, “all the windows and doors rattled” and “the sofa seemed to vibrate”. Others told BGS they “thought someone had crashed into the house” and “it was like a large explosion nearby”.
Some people took to social media to share their experience of the quake, which had its epicentre in the north west of the island near the village of Dervaig.
One person on Mull posted on X, formerly Twitter: “Anyone else here on the Isle of Mull think we’ve had a couple of earth tremors this evening? Like a rumbling train in a tunnel and lasting for a good number of seconds.”
Another person wrote: “We heard a weird bang and the glasses and plates in the dresser started rattling.”
Earlier on Monday, a 2.3 magnitude earthquake was recorded at Moidart in the Highlands at around 2.24pm, while a 1.1 magnitude quake hit Morvern, also in the Highlands, at 1.10pm. All three quakes were at a depth of 7km.
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Lucinda Cameron and Aisling Grace are reporters for PA.
