Tag Archives: geology

Finn’s Causeway

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steps across the Straits of Moyle to Scotland?

Once upon a time there was an Irish giant named Finn MacCool, or Fionn mac Cumhaill as he called himself in his native language. Finn wasn’t a Jack-in-the-Beanstalk kind of giant. He didn’t eat little children. Nor was he an ogre. He was pretty much a happy-go-lucky kind of guy, just very large. Finn used his hunting and warrior skills to fight evil, for the most part, but occasionally also took care of a few items on his own agenda, as is a giant’s prerogative.

When Finn was a boy, he trained under the druid Finnegas. Finnegas had spent seven years trying to catch the Salmon of Knowledge, a wonder of a fish that lived in the River Boyne and had become all-knowing by living off the hazelnuts of a holy tree. Whoever ate the Salmon of Knowledge would gain from it all the knowledge of the world.

While Finn was under the druid’s care, Finnegas finally caught the fish-of-all-fish. He told Finn to cook it for him, which he did while Finnegas eagerly anticipated his eye-opening meal. But while cooking, Finn burned his thumb and instinctively put it in his mouth, thereby tasting the fish and receiving its knowledge. Far from being angry, when Finnegas saw the light of knowledge in Finn’s eye he made sure Finn polished off every last bite of the salmon. Finn was able to call upon this knowledge in future confrontations with his enemies.

Finn decided to build a path of stepping stones across the twelve miles of water between Ireland and Scotland so he could easily cross without getting his feet wet. One day as he was working on it, he heard that a nasty old giant named Benandonner (definitely one of the ogrey kind) was looking for him. Knowing Benandonner was up to no good, Finn asked his wife Oona to help him hide. Oona dressed Finn as a baby and put him in a cradle. When Benandonner showed up, Oona told him Finn was away but was expected back at any moment. She offered Benandonner a griddle cake she was making. Unbeknownst to Benandonner, Oona had baked griddle irons into some of them. Benandonner took a bite, broke his teeth, and howled like a baby. Oona made fun of him, calling him weak. She fed a cake (without metal in it) to her “baby” who, of course, gobbled it down quite easily. Benandonner, afraid of what the father of this monster-child must be like, decided to clear out before Finn got home. He fled across the causeway to Scotland, destroying it as he went so that Finn couldn’t follow him.

The Giant’s Causeway is a geological wonder of over 40,000 interlocking basalt columns created by the slow cooling and shrinking of lava flows under the sea over 60 million years ago. It is like nothing I have seen before.

This crazy, curious landscape, and the engaging legend the Irish created centuries ago to explain it, is what brought me to Northern Ireland. The rest is icing on the cake.

  • the walk out to the causeway

The Burren

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the Burren

We were driving from the Cliffs of Moher through typically Irish, rolling, green pastureland on our way to our next stay in Galway when we came across this. Are we still in Ireland? What sort of geological mash-up is this?

the Burren, up close

This is the Burren (in Irish, Boireann or “great rock”) Great rock, indeed. Weird rock, as well. The limestone “pavement” has been eroded into large rectangles, or clints, with long, narrow fissures, called grikes, between them where the softer rock has eroded away. So weird that the rock eroded along gridlines!

clints (blocks) and grikes (grooves)

Today we hiked in Burren National Park, our third of six national parks in the Republic of Ireland. I had to get out in it and see it up close. We chose a short loop-walk to the monastic site of St. Cronan. And guess what I discovered there. My first holy well!  St. Cronan’s Well. Who knew?

Sure enough, there was a shrine to St. Cronan next to the well and faded strips of cloth hanging from tree branches overhead. [Serendipity] I felt like I had just won a scavenger hunt I hadn’t realized I was playing. Now I understand one reason people go in search of the wells; they’re spiritual geocaches. The thrill of the hunt may be what gets people out there, but it’s even more fun finding something you didn’t know was out there to find!

  • an easy hike to St. Cronan’s monastic site
  • well, maybe not such an easy hike after all
  • cow playgroup
  • “grass growing in turfs of earth…that lie between the rocks”
  • crossing the wall “in stile”
  • St. Cronan’s church
  • St. Cronan’s well!
  • a standing stone at the well
  • look carefully for strips of cloth hanging in the tree branches

In the 17th century, English Parliamentarian Edmund Ludlow, who served under Oliver Cromwell in Ireland, observed that the Burren “is a country where there is not enough water to drown a man, wood enough to hang one, nor earth enough to bury him…… and yet their cattle are very fat; for the grass growing in turfs of earth, of two or three foot square, that lie between the rocks, which are of limestone, is very sweet and nourishing.”

in the grike

He is absolutely right. Rainfall disappears quickly into the grikes between the clints and makes its way into the limestone aquifers below. There is essentially no soil on the limestone pavement for living organisms to establish themselves. What grass and trees there are grow in small plots of soil between the clints, yet the grikes themselves are a haven for all manner of tiny plants from Mediterranean to alpine to arctic in habitat, all living side-by-side. They are miniature, terrarium-like ravines in a network of barren rock; I could explore them all day. 

Very interesting terrain. Not at all what I expected. This, my friends, is exactly the reason I travel.

1000 Islands National Park

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This photo of Belleville is courtesy of TripAdvisor

 

With so many “rocks” sticking up out of the St. Lawrence River, which qualify as islands?

Interesting factoid: To be considered one of the 1000 Islands, an island must be above water for 365 days of the year and it must support at least one living tree. By these criteria, there are 1864 islands in the 1000 Islands. The smallest is Tom Thumb Island, on the Canadian side of the border. It has one tree and only a few square feet of land that stay above water all year long.

No island is bisected by the border between Canada and the United States, which is why the border through the 1000 Islands region is so jagged.

photo courtesy of Omegatron

Just Room Enough Island, aka Hub Island, is the smallest inhabited island. It’s in the US 1000 Islands. Funny, but the name of the family that owns it is Sizeland.