The environs of Dublin, within a dozen miles or so, possess singular charm and variety; and on Sundays the good folk keep the jaunting-cars busy throughout the regions from Delgany, Powerscourt and the Dublin mountains, to Leixlip, Howth and Malahide. Not many know that Malahide Castle contains an altar-piece from the oratory of Mary Queen of Scots, at Holyrood, for which Charles II gave two thousand pounds sterling. Among the valuable paintings in this Castle is a portrait of Charles I by Vandyke.
There is a territory within almost equally easy reach of Dublin, whose loveliness excels anything of the kind in Ireland except possibly the Blackwater in county Waterford. It is the Boyne valley between Slane and Beauparc. Everyone in Dublin admits it lovely—but no one has seen it!
In the north and west of Ireland the scenery is frequently wild and stern. Of this character is Fairhead on the Antrim Coast, the Robogdium Promontorium of Ptolemy the geographer, where on one's northward journey is obtained the first glimpse of the remarkable columnar basalt formation met with in profusion in the Giant's Causeway region. One of the basaltic pillars forming the stupendous natural colonnade over six hundred feet high at Fairhead, is a rectangular prism 33 feet by 36 on the sides, and 319 feet in height, and is the largest basaltic pillar known.
Further along this coast is the rope-bridge at Carrick-a-Rede, which sways in the wind as you walk over it, while the Atlantic waves boil in the appalling chasm beneath; and woe to you, if overcome by terror you attempt to lean on the thin hand-line.
The coast scenery in the vicinity of the Giant's Causeway is grandly impressive, as seen from a boat. The promontory called the Pleaskin, consisting of terrace upon terrace of columnar basalt, and the succession of extraordinary rock groups such as the Sea Gulls, the King and his Nobles, the Nursing Child, the Priest and his Flock, the Chimney Rock, the Giant's Organ, and finally the Causeway itself, form astonishing instances of nature's sportfulness.
The pillars in the Causeway number about forty thousand, and are composed mainly of irregular hexagonal prisms varying from fifteen to twenty-six inches in diameter, but all fitting together compactly. Among other features of the place is the Giant's Amphitheatre, which is exactly semi-circular, with the slopes at the same angle all round; while around the uppermost part runs a row of columns eighty feet high. As a German writer, Kahl, continues:
Then comes a broad rounded projection, like an immense bench, for the accommodation of the giant guests of Finn MacCumhal; then again a row of columns sixty feet high, and then again a gigantic bench, and so down to the bottom, where the water is enclosed by a circle of black boulder stones, like the limits of the arena.
Lomaland Photo. and Engraving Dept.
THE OLD HOUSES OF PARLIAMENT—NOW THE BANK OF IRELAND; COLLEGE GREEN, DUBLIN