In October 1588 the galleon Girona, Don Alonzo Martinez, Senor de la Casa de Levia de Rioja in command, was on the run. Defeated by the storms and by the English fleet, she, like the other few ships left in the defeated Spanish Armada, was overloaded, 1,300 men on board when there should have been just a tenth of that complement, trying to beat her way round Ireland. Spain was a long way away and wishful thinking perhaps as much as anything else lead Don Alonzo to believe they had sighted the chimneys of 'Sorley Boy' McDonnell’s Dunluce Castle. Sorley Boy, no friend of the English, would give them shelter. Their navigation wasn’t far out but these were not the chimneys of the castle. Rather they were strange rock formations a few miles west, the rock stacks of the Giant’s Causeway. Just nine men survived the wreck and for four hundred years its treasures – ducats and jewelled chains, golden cameos and bejewelled salamanders – lay off Port na Spaniagh till plucked from the sea and placed in the Ulster Museum in Belfast 1967. But the area still has many riches.

The Giant’s Causeway a unique mass of symmetrical basalt columns, crammed together — some six sided, some eight sided, some four, some five — 40,000 in all, some 40ft/12m high, created when molten volcanic lava cooled in the cold Atlantic. For centuries people preferred (and some still do) a different story of its creation. An Irish giant Finn McCool quarrelled with a Scots opponent and they both began to create a line of stepping stones to bridge the gap to Scotland. Then the cunning Finn retreated, built a vast cradle and tucked himself up in it wrapped in swaddling clothes. His Scots opponent seeing the size of Finn’s ‘baby’, extrapolated the size of his father and called it a day. The modern Visitor Centre tells both stories and also that of an old hydro-electrically powered tram, Ireland's first. The National Trust runs a bus for those not fit enough to enjoy the bracing walk.