by Rose Murphy

Spring break of my senior year of high school, my parents and I took a trip to Ireland, which had been a dream of mine since I found out about my distant Irish heritage as a young child. My young mind seized upon the idea of a far-off place to visit — one that I had some connection to, no matter how faint — and Ireland became the first place that I ever really wanted to go to, taking on a kind of mystical quality to me. It took us years to actually take the trip because we could never find the time. But in 2018, my spring break aligned with my mom’s spring break for the first time since I was in middle school and we were off. We were joined by my mom’s cousin and her husband. The trip lasted five days. We spent most of our time exploring the city of Dublin, seeing the Viking museum, the Guinness Storehouse, the Jameson Distillery on Bow Street, and some of the other tourist attractions scattered about the city. On the third day, the five of us took a day trip up to Northern Ireland. Early in the morning, we boarded a train in Dublin, got off a few hours later in Belfast, then got in a van for the brief ride from the train station to the tour bus that would take us the rest of the way to the coast. We made a brief stop to cross the Carrick-a-Rede rope bridge, which was constructed by fishermen in 1755 and is just wide enough for a single-file line of people to cross. The bridge is suspended between the mainland and Carrickarede Island, sixty-six feet away, nearly a hundred feet above sea level. After crossing the rope bridge, we got lunch before continuing on to the main point of the day trip: Giant’s Causeway.

Giant’s Causeway is a geological formation on the coast of Northern Ireland that points towards Scotland. It was made a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1986 because the rock formations reveal information about the geology and volcanic activity of the Tertiary period and because it is considered a “spectacle of natural beauty” according to the UNESCO site. It is made up of roughly 40,000 basalt columns, the tallest of which reaches almost forty feet into the air. Most of the columns are hexagons, but some have five or seven sides instead of six. There are three jetties made of the rock columns, the largest of which is the farthest from the top of the sloping road.

It was created when the Irish giant Finn MacCool tried to fight the Scottish giant Benandonner. Once Benandonner began to cross the causeway of hexagonal pillars, Finn MacCool saw that the Scottish Giant was much bigger than he had previously thought, so the Irish giant fled back home to his wife Oonagh. He told her that he had picked a fight with someone that he shouldn’t have. Oonagh told MacCool to hide in the bedroom as Benandonner neared their house. When he arrived, Oonagh greeted him, saying that her husband was out at the moment, but if he would like to wait, MacCool should return soon. While Benandonner waited for MacCool to return, Oonagh offered him a griddle cake with the metal griddle cooked into it, saying that it was her husband’s favorite meal. Benandonner broke a tooth on the cake and wondered how strong Finn MacCool must be to eat the meal regularly. Oonagh then said that their baby was getting hungry, so she went into the bedroom where MacCool was hiding, and carried him out dressed as a baby. Benandonner got very afraid, thinking how big MacCool must be if his child was the size of a full-grown adult. He said that he had to return to Scotland before the tide came in, covering the causeway, and fled. As Benandonner ran back across Giant’s Causeway to Scotland, he tore it up behind him so that Finn MacCool could not come after him, creating the jagged ends of the causeway on the Irish and Scottish shores.

At least, that is one version of the local myth explaining the origins of Giant’s Causeway, though it is a little different than the one we were told by our tour guide as our group walked down to the rock formation. The scientific explanation for the 40,000 basalt columns is a little less dramatic than the mythical one. The polygonal columns were formed roughly fifty-five million years ago by a lava plateau that contracted as it cooled at different rates. When the lava contracted, it fractured into an interconnected series of pentagonal, hexagonal, and heptagonal columns.

The causeway is a half-mile walk down the gentle slope of a mountainside. There are buses that run every ten or fifteen minutes from the visitor’s center down to the causeway and back for people who can’t or simply don’t want to make the trek. Visitors can listen to an audio or live guide as they take the walk, or they can simply read the informative signs on the side of the road leading down to the causeway. The visitors learn about the myth as well as the geological history surrounding the site and the history of the surrounding area. As we walked down the road, stopping periodically to let the shuttles pass us, our tour guide told us about the dead port town that used to exist around the Giant’s Causeway. He told us about the resort-type places and the private residences and sure enough, when I looked at the surrounding hillsides, the tell-tale remnants of building foundations were visible. But when I went to learn more about the town later, I couldn’t find it anywhere — as if it had never existed at all.

Once visitors reach the bottom of the winding road, they are free to clamber around the rocks, with only a half dozen workers with whistles to warn them if they get too close to the angry sea, or do something reckless.

The sheer joy of finding out that I was allowed to climb all over the cool-looking rocks sent me into a slight state of shock. I was so excited. I was completely content to wander over the rocks for a solid forty minutes and I thoroughly explored each of the three jetties individually. The biggest one reached about eighty feet into the sea from the shore. The columns formed a kind of cliff face with other, shorter, columns creating a treacherous and slippery path down to the water level. I sat and watched the waves crash against the rocks, forming tiny pools and waterfalls for what seemed like an eternity, but was probably only five minutes.

I also climbed on some of the boulders that were lying near the shore. They had once been part of the columns, but had broken off and weathered. I later found out that they were called — slightly creepily — Giant’s Eyes by the locals. The more I looked around, the more columns I saw. They made up Giant’s Causeway itself, of course, but also the Giant’s Eyes, and there were hexagonal columns embedded in the cliff faces that looked out over the Irish Sea. There are also a few free-standing columns known as the Chimney Stacks in the flat area between the cliffs and the causeway.

Around the back side of the farthest jetty, I discovered that coins had been hammered into the cracks between the columns — both horizontally and vertically — some to the point that they were bent at a ninety-degree angle and hammered flush against the columns while others were left to protrude straight out from the cracks. Some of the coins were green or brown and weathered so severely that they had lost all texture on their surfaces. Others were still recognizable as American quarters or euro coins. There were a few coins as high up as twenty or twenty-five feet off the ground. I left a coin of my own, wedged in the crack between one part of a column and the next, about five feet off the ground. I like to think that it’s still there and with it, a tiny part of me.