The Stones

The Stones is the colloquial term for the Giant's Causeway and I had occasion to go there recently, when an old friend stopped by for a couple of days.

It was busy.  Heck, it's always busy.  I should go at night, really...but apparently it's busy then too, with local photographers, wouldn't you know.

The stones are pretty impressive, truth be told:

This big old lump of rock caught my eye - well, hard not to, isn't it?  Looks like some Giant has plonked it there :) I was trying to hide the people around the back of it, but I failed miserably, on account of not taking into account that I was using the rangefinder, if you see what I mean.  21mm lens on HP5+ dunked in ID-11 and scanned.  There might have been an orange filter on the lens.

The Causeway is an area where the rocks have formed into columns of hexagonal shape, on account of volcanic activity several years ago.   There's about 40,000 of them, apparently and it's Northern Ireland's only Unesco World Heritage site.  There are similar stones on the Scottish Isle of Staffa, just across the water.

I gave up trying to get shots without people in them.  Mostly folk wander about, looking at the stones, photographing them and listening to the audio guide that they pick up at the Visitors' Centre.  

If you want to see what the stones looked like around the year 1900, check out the very first blog post on NE Liberties - here.