Hi history lovers and welcome or welcome back to the channel, where I bring you new videos
every week on all aspects of the past. Today on History Calling I have a story for you that
involves volcanos, rival giants and a race of malevolent deities and the setting for this video
is none other than my own home country of Northern Ireland. I’m speaking of course, about the history
of the Giant’s Causeway, a collection of over 40,000 basalt stones which are often hexagonal
in shape and which naturally fit together. This is not only our most famous landmark,
it’s a UNESCO world heritage site and the source of one of the most famous Irish legends around;
that of the giant Finn McCool (sometimes called Fingal) and his Scottish rival,
Benandonner, also known as the Red Man. So sit back, relax and prepare for a breakdown of Irish
legend versus reality, as I give you both the scientific explanation for the Causeway’s origins
and also the more entertaining tales that those of us who grew up here were taught in primary school.
Please remember to give this video a thumbs up and subscribe to the
channel with notifications switched on so that YouTube lets you know when I upload.
You can also follow me on Instagram, which is linked in the description
box and if you would like to support me further, you have the option to make a one-off donation
using the Thanks button below this video, which will enable you to post a customisable
and brightly coloured comment under it and get a one-time animation over the top of the video.
Let’s start with the scientific explanation of what brought the Giant’s Causeway into being.
The stones are around 50-60 million years old and were formed by volcanic activity in what has been
called the Tertiary period of Earth’s history, though apparently that terminology is a little
outdated now. To quote the Smithsonian magazine, ‘ a flood of lava oozed from fissures in the earth.
The molten rock cooled and contracted, cracking into a series of some 40,000 columns,
mostly in near-perfect hexagonal shapes.’ Research has indicated that this cracking
occurred between 1,544 and 1,634 degrees Fahrenheit. The Causeway therefore had a
very violent start to life and has also been here for far longer than humans,
so there would never have been any people in what is now Northern Ireland who could remember the
Causeway not being there, or offer any scientific explanation as to how it came to be (at least not
until modern science was invented). Still, from the late 17th century onwards, the historians
and proto-archaeologists of the day did their best to explain this strange, but beautiful phenomenon.
In 1688, Sir Robert Redding, a member of the Royal Society (which looked and still
does look into science) wrote a letter to the Society’s other members which was read out at
their meeting in January 1689. A summary of this letter (which is the earliest surviving account
of the Causeway we have) appears in the minutes of the Society’s meeting. These recorded that:
There was read Sr. Robert Reddings Description of ye Giants Causey [and that’s not a typo,
they referred to it as a Causey] within 2 miles of Dunluce [which is a reference to Dunluce Castle,
the ruins of which still exist a couple of miles up the road from the Causeway],
to the north thereof, in the County of Antrim in Ireland:
where there are a vast quantity of Hexagonall Pillars of stone about 8 Inches side, which stand
pitch't perpendicularly as in a Pavement runing down obliquely into the Sea. These Columns are
so regularly ranged and fitted one to the other that it seems rather the work of art than nature,
and they are made up of pieces of about 8 Inches deep, the Convexity of the bottom
parts entering into a Cavity in the Top of [the] next under it made to receive it.
There are a couple of points to note here. First, not all the stones are hexagons, though a great
many are. Second, although Redding thought they were too perfectly made and fitted together
to be the result of nature, of course we know that that is exactly how they were formed.
It was hard for anyone who hadn’t seen the Causeway to really understand what it looked
like though, particularly given how unusual the structure is. It was only in 1694 that the first
known image of it, which you can see here, was executed by a man named Christopher Cole.
It was drawn from an imaginary perspective, as aerial views like this weren’t possible until
the invention of hot air balloons and aircraft and perhaps because of this and Cole’s limitations as
an artist, it is not strictly accurate, though it isn’t terrible either. Two years later,
Edwin Sandys was sent by the Dublin Philosophical Society to make a second, more accurate drawing,
which was published in 1697 and which you see on screen now. Other drawings would
follow in the next century, as the Causeway’s appearance became familiar to a wider audience.
Then, in the mid to late 19th century, photographs began to emerge of it,
which put paid to the need for the less reliable medium of hand-drawn images.
Unfortunately, as its fame grew, so too did the practice of removing stones from the Causeway,
either for scientific analysis elsewhere, or just to be used for ornaments. The one you see here
sits in the gardens of Hillsborough Castle, which is the monarch’s official residence
in Northern Ireland. Irish writer, philosopher and politician, William Molyneux, wrote to the
Royal Society in London in 1697, that he had two chunks of Causeway stone in his garden in Ireland
and would send them one by boat, which he duly did. His brother Thomas had also removed pieces
and taken them to his home in the late 1690s. One of the more egregious examples of this practice
which I’ve read about though, comes from a letter written in 1753 by the Rev. Richard Pocock,
who was then the Archdeacon of Dublin and who reported that during the previous summer of 1752:
I spent a week at the Causeway, and sent away by sea to Dublin as great a variety of stones as I
could conveniently get, particularly a large octagon with the eight large stones round it;
a pair of less, with eight pair, that encompass it;
two small pentagon pillars, about fourteen inches over, one of them three feet ten and
a half inches high, the other five feet seven inches; one hexagon pillar about the same size,
and five feet five inches high; all which I have placed in my garden.
So basically this guy took enough to make his own mini-causeway back home,
which I consider shameful vandalism which permanently damaged the Causeway
and which showed no consideration for future generations. Those stones had been sitting there,
quite happily, for at least 50 million years until Pocock decided that he was so special
that he should be able to just rip them up and stick them in his garden. I’m not impressed.
As studies of the Causeway increased, more accurate theories regarding its creation gradually
began to appear and by 1834, though there was still no consensus as to how it had come about,
many people were on the right track. As an article in the Dublin Penny Journal for that year said:
With respect to the formation of the basalts along the Causeway coast, as well as of basalts in
general, various and opposing opinions have been entertained by some of the most scientific men;
one party maintaining they were formed by the action of water, and another as strenuously
contending that they owe their origin to fire, and are simply the formations of boiling lava,
which at a remote period had issued from the crater of some volcano, now extinct.
The mythical stories of the Causeway’s origins never disappeared though and so we come to the
fun bit of video – a retelling of these legends. The Irish name for the Causeway
(which I’ll put onscreen for you, but which I’m not going to attempt to say because I don’t
speak Irish and I’ll just botch it), suggests one lesser known myth behind its formation,
because it translates to ‘stepping stones of the Formorii’. The Formorii, or Formorians,
according to the Dictionary of Celtic Mythology, were pre-Christian deities, often depicted as
demonic, or at the very least, monstrous. The far more famous explanation given by mythology for the
Causeway’s existence though, concerns an Irish giant named Finn McCool and his Scottish rival,
Benandonner. There are various versions of this tale, each with slightly different details,
so the story I’m going to tell you shouldn’t be taken as the definitive account,
because no such account exists, but the gist of the story is as follows:
Once upon a time there was an Irish giant named Finn McCool who was engaged in a war of words
with a Scottish giant named Benandonner. Bellowing at each other across water between Scotland and
Ireland, each said that he could beat the other in a fight and so, in order to facilitate that clash,
Finn built the Causeway (and it will become clear in a minute why I’ve highlighted the
island of Staffa on this map). However upon making it to Scotland and seeing his would-be foe in the
distance, he realised that Benandonner was much bigger than he and so Finn, intelligent man that
he was, naturally took off back to Ireland as fast as he could. Unfortunately for him,
Benandoonner was in pursuit. Finn made it back to what is now the north Antrim coast,
where he lived with his wife (let’s call her Oonagh, but I’ve heard her given various names)
and was in such haste to get back into the house, that after passing the Giant’s
organ which he used to make music (here are its pipes, though some people also call them looms)
and going through the Giant’s gate which leads from the Causeway into a little beach-like area
next to it, he lost one of his boots on the shoreline, where it still lies today.
He arrived back at their home which was built into the cliffs, though sadly only the chimney
stacks remain nowadays and Oonagh quickly came up with a plan to deal with Benandonner.
Finn got into their baby’s cradle (the baby either wasn’t there, or in some versions of the story,
Finn had time to build a crib) and when Benandonner arrived, spoiling for a fight,
Oonagh told him that Finn wasn’t at home, but that he was welcome to wait.
Whilst in her house, she gave him bread with an iron plate baked inside it, telling him when he
complained about the difficulty of eating it that that was her husband’s favourite food.
Benandonner was already worried about what kind of man, or rather giant, Finn would turn out to be,
when Oonagh showed him the ‘baby’ (in inverted commas) in the cradle. Upon seeing the size of
the supposed infant, Benandonner grew very afraid of how big the father must be and so he ran back
to Scotland, tearing up the causeway as he went so that Finn couldn’t follow him. This is why,
in Fingal’s Cave (named after Finn of course), which is on the island of Staffa in Scotland,
pillars identical to those found at the Giant’s Causeway exist, because Staffa
was where the Scottish end of the Causeway reached land (in reality of course, the stones
on Staffa were created by the same volcanic activity which formed the Giant’s Causeway,
but let’s not spoil the story with pesky science). As well as the Causeway itself and the other
evidence of Finn’s life there which I’ve already mentioned, there is also a well which provided the
giant and his family with fresh drinking water and which is now considered a wishing well.
There is a wishing chair too, formed from a set of stones which make a throne. In days gone by this
chair was only supposed to be sat on by women and so was known as the Lady’s Wishing Chair,
but nowadays all are welcome to give it a go and the number of bottoms which have sat on it have
apparently made the stone there extra smooth. You might also hear some additional bits of the two
giants’ story, including that Finn scooped up a huge mound of earth and threw it across the
Channel at Benandonner at some point during their disagreement, only to miss quite spectacularly and
inadvertently create the Isle of Mann, which lies in the Irish Sea between Britain and Ireland. The
gap left where he removed the earth from Ireland filled with water and became Lough Neagh (not to
be confused with Scotland’s Lough Ness – and no, we don’t have a Lough Neagh monster if
anyone’s wondering, though we should really invent one, because tourists love that kind of thing).
And so history lovers, now you know the story, or rather stories of the Giant’s Causeway.
I’ll leave it up to you which version of events you opt to believe in.
Let me know in the comments below what your favourite natural landmark in the world is
and if you’d like to learn more about Irish history and mythology, try one of these videos
next. I’ll be back next week with something new to entertain you and until then, keep learning.