Thursday, June 14, 2007

Natural beauty here as well

We've been enjoying many aspects of Ireland and most of the ones we've shown have been castles, cathedrals and other man made structures but today as we made it to the very top of Ireland (we could just see Scotland), we got to enjoy the completely natural beauty of the Giant's Causeway and the Carrick-a-rede rope bridge from the mainland to a small island.

This bridge was created by fisherman originally about 350 years ago. They built the bridge to get closer to the migrating salmon that came through the area each year. The bridge still gets put across every summer and taken down every winter.



Here you can see Hilary in the red windbreaker and Tony in the grey one. Hilary has always claimed to be afraid of heights but after making it across this bridge she's decided she can't say that anymore.



The rocks below are part of the Giant's Causeway. These rocks were formed around 60 million years ago by a large flow of lava into the valley. The lava was able to cool quite slowly thus forming the mostly hexagonal shapes. There are about 40,000 of these rock formations in a small bay. This formation is likened to how mud can dry with geometric shapes, it was an amazing landscape!!!

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

this looks absolutely beautiful.
wish i could be over there with you two.

caitlin

kurto said...

wow good job crossing the bridge Hilary! Certainly looks scary ey :O