Five Feet, Nine Inches Above Ground

Saturday August 10 2024

The Giant’s Causeway was the main reason for my trip to Northern Ireland. It’s approximately an hour and a half drive from where I was staying to its location on the northern coastline of the island. I booked my entry ticket online which included an arrival time, parking and a group tour of the site. The countryside was spectacular, lots of very prosperous looking farms with grain crops being harvested and hay being cut and dried. The drying part is not so easy with the amount of rain that has been falling. After a hearty breakfast of hot porridge with fresh fruit and coffee, the trip began.

Our tour guide was Roy, a local beekeeper with a fine sense of humour and lots of detailed stories about the Causeway – I think he invented some of them – and off we went on the walk to the bottom of the coastline cliffs.

Spoiler alert! There were no giants, not ever! The Causeway was formed by slow moving lava flows, several at the same time and the result was the geologic formations we see today. They are symmetrical in nature and were popularized at the end of the 18th century by a local female artist who published her of the site water colour paintings under a pseudonym. Her real name was Susanna Drury (1739) and her work won a prize awarded by the Royal Dublin Society. They were engraved in 1743 and sold well. Today, over 900,000 people visit the site per year. The National Trust took over responsibility for the site in the 1960s. To my mind, it is well organized and there is concerted effort to return the area to its natural state and maintain it as such. Our guide left us to our own devices once we reached the Causeway. I explore the possibility of walking up the trail/stairs to the top of the cliff but decided against it. Instead, I retraced my steps to the starting point, had lunch and then followed the trail along the top of the cliff overlooking the bay. The view was spectacular in all directions and the wind was blowing like crazy.

The afternoon sun was competing with the clouds, the wind was blowing with threats of rain and it was time to say goodbye! Tomorrow a road trip to Kildare was on the agenda with an overnight stay. Monday was to be return the car day in Kilkenny and take the train to Dublin. See you in Kildare!