The Giant's Causeway

At a Glance

• Central figures: Fionn mac Cumhaill, captain of the fianna of Ireland; Benandonner, a giant from across the water in Scotland; Oonagh, Fionn’s wife.
• Setting: The northeast coast of Ulster, at the headland where basalt columns meet the sea, and the facing Scottish shore.
• The turn: Fionn builds a causeway of stone pillars across the strait to answer Benandonner’s challenge, then discovers the Scottish giant is far larger than any man he has ever fought.
• The outcome: Oonagh disguises Fionn as an infant; Benandonner, seeing the size of the “baby” and imagining the father, tears up the causeway behind him as he flees back to Scotland.
• The legacy: The thousands of interlocking basalt columns that remain on the Antrim coast - and their mirror formation on the Scottish island of Staffa - are what is left of Fionn’s causeway.

Fionn mac Cumhaill stood on the cliffs at the edge of Ulster and looked north across the channel. The water was grey. Scotland sat on the far side, low and dark. Somewhere over there a giant named Benandonner had been shouting his name for weeks, calling him coward, calling him small, promising to cross the strait and grind his bones if Fionn would not come to him.

Fionn was not small. He was the biggest man in Ireland, captain of the fianna, the man who had tasted the Salmon of Knowledge and could put his thumb to his teeth and know what was hidden. But Benandonner’s voice carried across miles of open water, and a voice that size belongs to a body that size. Fionn listened to it rolling over the waves and said nothing for a long time.

The Causeway

He began pulling columns of stone from the headland. The basalt there breaks naturally into pillars, hexagonal and close-fitted, and Fionn worked them loose one by one - though “one by one” is misleading when each pillar was thick as an oak and tall as three men. He drove them down into the seabed, stepping out from the shore, setting each column flush against the last so that the surface was even enough to walk on. The causeway grew northward.

It took days. Each night the tide gnawed at what he had built and each morning the pillars held, because basalt does not care about tides. Fionn worked without rest, his arms aching from shoulder to wrist, his feet bleeding on the sharp-cut stone. He did not send any of his fianna to help. This was between him and Benandonner and no one else.

When the causeway reached the Scottish shore, he set his feet on the far beach and looked inland. And there was Benandonner, coming down from the hills.

Benandonner

The Scottish giant was not twice Fionn’s size. He was something worse than that - three times, perhaps more, with legs like the trunks of ships and a head that blocked out the sky behind it. His shadow fell across Fionn before Fionn could see the colour of his eyes.

Fionn put his thumb to his teeth. The knowledge came through hot and clear: You cannot beat this man. Not with strength. Not with a sword. Not with anything you have brought.

So Fionn ran.

He ran back along his own causeway, the basalt ringing under his feet, and he did not stop until he was through his own door in Ulster. Oonagh was there, and she saw the colour of his face before he said a word.

“He’s coming,” Fionn said.

Oonagh’s Plan

Oonagh did not waste time asking how big. She looked at her husband - the largest man in Ireland, the killer of Aillen, the champion who had faced down armies - and she told him to lie down in the cradle.

The cradle was enormous. It had been built for their son, who was already a sizeable child, but Fionn fit if he pulled his knees up. Oonagh wrapped him in blankets, tied a bonnet around his head, and tucked the edges in until only his face showed.

Then she baked. She put iron skillets - flat griddle pans - inside some of the bread cakes and left the others plain. She set them out on the table and opened the door.

Benandonner’s footsteps were already shaking the ground. He came up the causeway at a walk, which was worse than running - a man who runs is angry, but a man who walks is certain. He filled the doorframe when he arrived. His knuckles dragged against the lintel.

“Where is Fionn mac Cumhaill?”

“Out,” said Oonagh, calm as a woman who has poured tea a thousand times. “He’ll be back soon. Sit. Eat.”

She handed Benandonner one of the bread cakes with the iron skillet inside. He bit down and a tooth cracked. He spat blood and stared at the bread.

“That’s our everyday bread,” Oonagh said. “Fionn eats six of those for his breakfast.”

She handed a plain cake to the shape in the cradle. Fionn - bonneted, blanketed, enormous - bit through it easily and reached for another.

Benandonner looked at the baby in the cradle. The baby was the size of a grown man. It was eating bread that had just broken one of his teeth. He looked at the cradle’s proportions and did the calculation any man would do: if the child is this big, what size is the father?

The Retreat

Benandonner stood up so fast he cracked the roof beam. He did not speak. He went out the door and back down to the coast at a run, and as he ran along the causeway he tore up the pillars behind him, ripping them from the seabed and hurling them into the channel so that no one - no giant from Ireland, no champion of the fianna, and certainly not whatever impossible man had fathered that infant - could follow.

The causeway broke apart. The central span vanished into the sea. What remained were the two ends: the columns on the Antrim headland, stepping down into the water like a staircase that leads nowhere, and a matching formation on the Scottish island of Staffa, where the pillars rise into a sea cave and the waves still boom inside it.

What Remained

Fionn climbed out of the cradle and pulled the bonnet off his head. Oonagh was already cleaning up the broken bread. Neither of them said much about it afterward. There is not much glory in winning by lying in a cradle, and the fianna had a long tradition of not asking their captain questions he did not want to answer.

But the stones stayed. The hexagonal columns still stand on the Antrim coast, forty thousand of them by some counts, fitted together so precisely that they look worked by hands. Across the water, Staffa’s columns mirror them - the same stone, the same shape, the same impossible regularity. The gap between is all open sea. Whatever road once connected them is gone, torn apart by a man running from a fight he had already lost to a woman pouring tea.