Formed over the last 61 million years or so, The Giant’s Causeway is an amazing place. The story goes that the Giant Fin MacCool laid the Causeway so that he would have a road to his true love who lived on the island of Staffa in Scotland, where there are similar stones. Like Loch Ness and Stonehenge, this is one of those places that just calls to me. But unlike Stonehenge and Loch Ness, I have yet to make it to the Giant’s Causeway.
The Giant’s Causeway is an area of about 40,000 interlocking basalt columns resulting from a volcanic eruption. It is located on the North East coast of Northern Ireland, about 3 kilometers (2 miles) north of the town of Bushmills.
A fine circular walk will take you down to the Grand Causeway, past stone columns and formations with fanciful names like the Honeycomb, the Giant’s Granny, the Wishing Well, and the King and his Nobles, past Port na Spaniagh where the Spanish Armada ship Girona foundered, past wooden staircase to Benbane Head and back along the cliff top.
The “discovery” of the Giant’s Causeway was announced to the world in 1693 by the presentation of a paper to the Royal Society from Sir Richard Bulkeley, a fellow of Trinity College, Dublin, although the “discoverer” had, in fact, been the Bishop of Derry who had visited the site a year earlier. The site received international attention when Dublin artist Susanna Drury made watercolor paintings of it in 1739; they won Drury the first award presented by the Royal Dublin Society in 1740 and were engraved in 1743.[4]In 1765 an entry on the Causeway appeared in volume 12 of the French Encyclopédie, which was informed by the engravings of Drury’s work; the engraving of the “East Prospect” itself appeared in a 1768 volume of plates published for the Encyclopédie. In the caption to the plates French geologist Nicolas Desmarest suggested, for the first time in print, that such structures were volcanic in origin.
The Giant’s Causeway is today owned and managed by the National Trust and it is the most popular tourist attraction in Northern Ireland.
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