The Giant's Causeway

All photos enlarge if clicked on

The Giant's Causeway is a World Heritage site, National Nature Reserve, and Northern Ireland’s premier tourist attraction.

We walked along the causeway path and passed many unusual cliff rock formations along the way.

We finally began seeing the unusual natural rock formations on the ground along the coast.

The Giant's Causeway is an area of about 40,000 interlocking basalt columns, the result of an ancient volcanic eruption 60 million years ago. Most columns are hexagonal, but some have four, five, eight or ten sides, and are about 12 inches across.

It is estimated that about 40,000 of the basalt columns extend from the cliffs down into the sea.

Close to the shore, they have been eroded to form the Grand, Middle, and Little Causeways.

There are a few different legends about the Giant Finn MacCool built the causeway to walk to Scotland to fight his counterpart Benandonner. If you click on MacCool's name it will take you to a website where you can read the entire amusing and fanciful story about him.

My husband and I had a lot of fun climbing over the columns, balancing on them, sitting on the different formations, and taking photos of them. Lots of other tourists did too!

They were so unusual and truly looked like nature's stepping stones leading into the ocean. I could see how they could be thought of as magical, and entertain a bit of lore and fable as to their purpose.



You can watch a short preview of the audio-visual film they show at the Giant's Causeway visitors center here --just click on your bandwidth speed at the link on the website. Also, there are some videos people have taken of the area on YouTube. Just put "Giant's Causeway" in the search box to see a list of them.



Our very full and wonderful day in Northern Ireland comes to an end, and we return to Dublin by bus then rail.
Next blog post we'll be back in Dublin, and I'll be happy to show you some more highlights of that beautiful and friendly city.