The Giant’s Causeway

Since the ever-wonderous godmother Lady Demelza is visiting, we incorporated a local geological excursion into our educational outings this week, and went to Fingal Head.

Demelza, being something of a world-traveller akin to myself, has been to the big, famous Giant’s Causeway in Ireland and was all excited about it, and being the awesome Demelza that she is, she’d also been to the lesser (but equally awesome) Giant’s Causeway in Fingal Head, NSW. So off we went, to the beach!

Funnily, I’ve been living in this area for about 5 years now and I had no idea this was here, but there you go. Even I got to learn something.

We had a picnic lunch and clambered up to the top to admire the view.

Lady Demelza, having recently seen a documentary on the subject, gave us an in-depth explanation about how the hexagonal shapes form in the basalt as it cools, and we marvelled that the lava had, at some point, flowed all the way from Wollumbin – Mt Warning, which is quite some distance away from Fingal Head, but once covered the whole area.

Of course the intrepid Littletree and I clambered down to explore the rocks out on the headland – Littletree was fascinated to note how the rocks are indeed hexagonal, but not all perfectly so. We debated the possibility that the rocks here in Australia formed larger and less-perfect hexagons because they might have cooled slower in a warmer climate than those in Ireland

So a new interest in geology is following close on the heels of Littletree’s recent obsessions with microbiology, physics and astronomy.