The Giants Causeway is the jewel in Northern Ireland’s crown. Crafted by powerful natural forces unleashed on this part of the planet over sixty million years ago. Back then the North Antrim coast was a hell on Earth and it was here this incredible beauty was born. Today the Causeway’s geological past sets it apart as a place of global significance. Its importance as a World Heritage Site attracts half a million visitors every year and it’s easy to see why.
Giant’s Causeway Story
This this is a unique landscape. A mystical space. Ireland’s earliest settlers created a mythology that embraced the natural symmetry of the Giant’s Causeway. Its very name owes more to the imagination of the ancient tribes of the Antrim Coast than it does to geological fact. For them this was the birth place of the mythological hero Fionn mac Cumhaill on this causeway Finn fought the good fight for Ulster against the Scottish giant Benandonna. Intelligence won the battle and the pathway from Antrim to Scotland was secured. This was a land bridge worth defending. When science and reality revisit the myth a more powerful and important story emerges.
Facts About the Giant’s Causeway
The Giants Causeway is the epicentre of a major geological story… the story of an island’s journey across space and time. A movement from the southern to the northern hemisphere that began hundreds of millions of years ago. From Murlough Bay to White Park Bay we can find signs of the advance of this part of the planet from below the Tropic of Capricorn to the equator and beyond some five hundred million years ago. So we came from ice to tropical forest then searing desert heat to settle in our present temperate position where we were convulsed by volcanic activity. A mere sixty five million years ago nature became the architect of what today we call the Giant’s Causeway. The lava that erupted from the earth here cooled so quickly that it crystallised into the shapes that set the Causeway apart. Nature fashioned these jewels with a mathematical precision unseen on this scale anyone else in the world. with its hexagonal columns reaching from seabed to surface, from cliff bottom to top today this fascinating landscape supports a unique ecosystem that boasts its own rare flora and fauna.
The visitor’s experience often goes beyond the Giant’s Causeway. Northern Ireland and its North Antrim coast boasts many other historical and unique attractions. Whether visitors are interested in the final resting place of the Spanish Armada near the causeway with its vast cache of buried treasure or ancient castles and ruins or other National Trust properties this slice of the history of the world is the ideal starting point. This is a place apart. A coastline unequalled anywhere else on the planet. This is the Giant’s Causeway fashioned entirely by nature.
