The terraces are in fact the shorelines of a glacial loch dammed by an ice lobe in the Loch Lomond Stadial, roughly 11,000 to 10,000 years ago. Wikipedia records that Charles Darwin visited in June 1838 and published a paper in 1839 arguing they were marine beaches. Louis Agassiz's glacial theory of 1840 contradicted it, and in 1861 to 1862 T. F. Jamieson's work led Darwin to call his paper one long gigantic blunder.
The legend is a clear example of a Gaelic explanation of a landscape feature before the scientific one.
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