Qualla: Giant's Causeway

Giant's Causeway: Introduction

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit CC BY-SA 3.0. About forty thousand columns step out of the cliff and walk down into the sea. Most have six sides. Some have four. Some have five, seven, eight. The tallest stand about twelve metres high. The lava that cooled into them is twenty-eight metres thick in places. They were once part of a great volcanic plateau called the Thulean Plateau, which formed during the Paleocene around fifty to sixty million years ago, when the Atlantic was still opening and lava sheets covered what is now Northern Ireland, the Hebrides, Iceland, and Greenland. The science is exact. The Irish name says something different. Clochán na bhFomhórach: stepping stones of the Fomorians, the giants who came before the gods.

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Image: CC BY-SA 3.0

Giant's Causeway: How Basalt Remembers

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Lindy Buckley from Nanjing, China, CC BY 2.0. When thick basaltic lava cools slowly enough, it contracts. The contraction has to go somewhere, and it goes into a network of fractures that propagate from the cooling surface downward. Where the rate of cooling is steady and the lava is right, those fractures meet at angles tha...

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Image: Lindy Buckley from Nanjing, China | CC BY 2.0

Giant's Causeway: Fionn and Benandonner

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Bernard Ladenthin, CC BY 4.0. The other story is harder to date and easier to remember. The Irish giant Fionn mac Cumhaill - Finn MacCool in English - was challenged to a fight by the Scottish giant Benandonner, and Fionn built a causeway across the sea so the two could meet. In one telling, Fionn wins. In a ...

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Image: Bernard Ladenthin | CC BY 4.0

Giant's Causeway: Drury's Watercolours

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Bernard Ladenthin, CC BY 4.0. William King, Bishop of Derry, came to look at the rocks in 1692. A paper by Sir Richard Bulkeley of Trinity College, Dublin, took the news to the Royal Society the following year. The Causeway became known to the wider European world in 1739, when the Dublin artist Susanna Drury...

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Image: Bernard Ladenthin | CC BY 4.0

Giant's Causeway: A Boot, a Harp, a Camel's Hump

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit David A. Victor at English Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0. Visitors over the centuries have given names to weathered shapes in the basalt. The Organ. The Giant's Boot. The Chimney Stacks. The Giant's Harp. The Camel's Hump. Reddish low columns are called Giant's Eyes; uneven stacks are the Honeycomb. Fulmar, petrel, cormorant, shag, reds...

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Image: David A. Victor at English Wikipedia | CC BY-SA 3.0

Giant's Causeway: Pedro II and Almost a Million Visitors

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Kbaue39, CC BY-SA 4.0. Emperor Pedro II of Brazil came to the Causeway on 9 July 1877, in the middle of an unpublicised three-day visit to Ireland. The site was already a tourist destination then. It got busier when the Causeway Tramway opened in 1883, hauling people from Portrush through Bushmills to ...

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Image: Kbaue39 | CC BY-SA 4.0