• John McLaughlin
  

• 
  Autumn 2012
  Volume 29. No. 3

Architecture
Architecture & Design
Architecture
Giant's Causeway Vistors Centre Antrim
John McLaughlin

• Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin

The Giant’s Causeway is a dramatic landscape of columnar volcanic basalt on the north coast of County Antrim in Northern Ireland. It was formed around 60 million years ago during the tertiary period by great flows of basalt lava that welled up through cracks in the earth’s crust and spread out over 3000 square kilometres creating layer upon layer of rock. Some of the layers are as much as 30 metres thick. The specific formation of the Causeway is due to the fact that these basalt layers cooled rapidly in a river valley which caused them to contract into polygons which then cracked vertically producing stacked vertical columns of organ pipe-like structures buried in the earth. The rock was subsequently exposed by glacial erosion which created the unique landscape that we see today. The volcanic lava reached over to the western coast of Scotland and the same polygonal columns can be seen holding up the coast of the western Scottish isle of Staffa near Mull which is what gave rise to the legend of a giant who built the Causeway between the two places. In 1986 the Giant’s Causeway was entered into the register of UNESCO natural world heritage sites – one of only three on the islands of Ireland and Britain. The listing was for three different reasons – the site is significant as a geological formation; as a unique landscape; and for the role that it played in the emergence of the science of geology in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The other two natural world heritage sites are the islands of St Kilda off the north coast of Scotland, and the Jurassic coast of east Dorset in the South of England.