Arctic Adventure Part 15 - Northern Irish giants

On the coast of Northern Ireland you will find this place:

This is Giant's Causeway. At first I couldn't quite grasp what I was seeing until I walked all the way down to the waters edge and looked back.

There are around 40,000 of the columns

The addition of people in the photo should start to make it look familiar to anyone in my generation.

Now does it look familiar?
This is the 1973 album cover to Led Zeppelin's
Houses of the Holy.

 The Houses of the Holy album cover, was done in true Led Zeppelin fashion (i.e. even if you're incredibly stoned it still makes no sense). Arthur C Clarke’s novel Childhoods End was the inspiration for the cover. At the end of the novel all the children gather waiting to be taken into space. The back story on the album cover photo is quite bizarre. That single photo took 10 days to shoot. Although you see 11 kids on the cover, it's really only two - Stefan Gates and his sister Samantha (both were 4).

Stefan went on to become a very well known British TV food critic, producer, author, and presenter. 

Stefan Gates today

The photo dogged him his whole life. He never knew the story behind it and, even more remarkable, he never listened to the album.  Finally, in 2011, BBC did a radio piece about the whole thing and he made an emotional journey back to the causeway where he heard the album for the first time (no idea if he liked the album or not).

So the question remains - what the hell is the Giant's Causeway?

Most are hexagonal, however, you can find 4,5,7, and 8 sided columns

According to Irish legend - the Irish giant Finn MacCool was challenged to a fight by the Scottish giant Benandonne (Scotland is just across the water). Finn accepted the challenge and built a causeway across the North Channel to meet the Scot.  After he crossed over he snuck around and discovered the Scot was much bigger than him.  In a panic he crossed back to Ireland.  His wife had an idea and disguised Finn as a baby and stuck him in a cradle. Benadonne crossed over looking for the fight, but when he saw the size of Finn's "baby" reckoned the father must be huge. He fled back to Scotland, wrecking the causeway behind him so he couldn't be followed (on the Scottish side of the North Channel there are some identical basal columns).

From a geologist's viewpoint the story is quite different:

Around 50 to 60 million years ago, during the Paleocene Epoch, Antrim was subject to intense volcanic activity, when highly fluid molten basalt intruded through chalk beds to form an extensive lava plateau. As the lava cooled, contraction occurred. Horizontal contraction fractured in a similar way to drying mud, with the cracks propagating down as the mass cooled, leaving pillar-like structures, which are also fractured horizontally into "biscuits". The size of the columns is primarily determined by the speed at which lava from a volcanic eruption cools. The extensive fracture network produced the distinctive columns seen today.

standing on Giant's Causeway looking to the hills - this is chimney stacks

Organ pipes

The choice of pavers used in the parking lot was not lost one me.

In case someone falls in the water

Out for a wee sail

The Irish coastline is spectacular and dotted with small islands. This is Carrick-a-Rede

Nobody who is afraid of heights visits this island  

The rope bridge is 98' above the rocks (crummy picture)

Didn't have time to cross it myself (probably a good thing as I would have had a hard time resisting the urge to find the resonate frequency of the bridge - making it rock). In the 1970's the bridge had only one hand rail and lots of gaps between slats.
By User:Itub - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=1544603

this is Hussaini bridge in Pakistan (for comparison)

It's thought that for 350 years salmon fishermen took advantage of natural water shunt between the island and mainland.

Nice sophisticated mechanism for launching the boat. I bet the fishing is good at the bottom of the white steps.

It would be sad to visit the coast of Ireland and not see a ruined castle. I wasn't disappointed.

This is Dunluce Castle (from medieval times)

It used to belong to the MacQuillan family back in 1500

It's now a tourist attraction (complete with it's own app)

As you would expect, the castle has an interesting (and quite bloody) history, but boy, you need a lot of Irish whiskey to be able to listen to it.

Speaking of Irish whiskey brings me to a story about how sometimes you can take an iconic picture without realizing it at the time:

This is the Old Bushmills Distillery in Bushmills (go figger), Northern Ireland.  I quicksnapped the picture as our bus drove by on the way to Giant's Causeway. I had no idea how famous this view is.

As usual, there's a bit of controversy about the 10 pound bill now.  No, not Brexit. In 2014 Bushmills was bought by
Jose Cuervo. As Homer Simpson would say "Doh!"

In Belfast is one of Northern Ireland's best known pubs -  The Crown.

"Opened by Felix O'Hanlon as The Railway Tavern, the pub was then bought by Michael Fanigan. Fanigan's son Patrick renamed and renovated the pub in 1885".  Yeah, so what? The key here is the year of the renovation.  In 1885 the churches in Belfast were expanding. They had brought in a number of highly talented Italian craftsmen.  Patrick was able to hire them for "after-hours" work.

Clever annunciation system for service requests from the "snugs" (private booths) 

Snug

Used for striking kitchen matches in the old smoking days

Yes, that's my drop of Guinness sitting on the bar. Man Guinness in Ireland is good (too bad it doesn't bottle and travel well - no idea why that is). The Belfast lager was OK.

This is the mirror on the wall of our snug.  Look closely at it's awful condition (upper left - cracked).

It's cracked and looks like hell, until you read the inscription (below)

Not ISIS but rather IRA

One of the long running sources of amusement is the placement of the Crown logo.

It's on the floor of the entrance. This placement was a clever compromise reached between Patrick (a British loyalist) and his wife (hated the British monarchy). He got to display his allegiance to the crown, she got to see everyone walk all over it.

Belfast is not as large a city (350,000) as you might expect given how much it's been in the news over the years (I'm referring to "the Troubles"). Today its a calm city that is nowhere near as charming as Edinburgh, Scotland. That being said, it is home to Harlan and Wolff. H&W were the builders of:

Titanic
By Robert John Welch (1859-1936), official photographer for Harland & Wolff - This image is available from the United States Library of Congress's Prints and Photographs division under the digital ID cph.3a27541.

We docked right across from the ways that the Titanic slid down. The two yellow gantry cranes (named Sampson and Goliath) are Belfast landmarks.

H&W, despite the Titanic blot on their name, built ships for many years (until the Japanese, then the Koreans took over shipbuilding).

In the 1960's H&W built Europe's first supertanker Myrina - still plying the oceans today

As is fitting for the location, next to the shipyard Titanic was built in is the new Titanic Museum.

It's a huge place and (according to reports from friends who visited) done quite well.  I didn't visit.  A. I'd heard enough about the Titanic already on this trip. B. It's bad juju to visit the Titanic when you're on a long cruise yourself.