Stones Like Honeycomb

Original fiction written for Revision Library; no external source reproduced.

Aoife had seen photographs of the Giant's Causeway a hundred times in books, but nothing had prepared her for the sound of it: waves cracking against thousands of grey-black stone columns, each one packed so tightly against its neighbours that the whole shoreline looked, from a distance, like a colossal honeycomb tipped on its side.

"Careful on the wet ones," said her grandfather, Cormac, holding out a weathered hand as she hopped from one hexagonal stone to the next. He had grown up in a cottage two miles along this coast and had been bringing Aoife here every summer since she was small enough to be carried on his shoulders.

"How are they all the same shape?" Aoife asked, crouching to run her fingers along the smooth, six-sided top of the nearest column. "It looks like someone carved them on purpose."

"That's what most visitors think," Cormac said, easing himself down onto a flatter rock nearby. "But no one carved a single one of these. About sixty million years ago, this whole area was covered in molten lava, pouring out of cracks in the earth. When lava cools slowly and evenly, it shrinks, and it cracks in a very particular pattern, mostly into six-sided columns, because that shape wastes the least energy as the rock contracts. Nature doing sums, you might say, without a single mathematician involved."

Aoife looked out at the thousands of columns stretching towards the water, some standing tall as stools, others worn down to smooth, uneven stumps by centuries of pounding waves. "There's so many of them."

"Forty thousand, they reckon, give or take," Cormac said. "Though I doubt anyone's ever sat down and counted every single one."

A gull wheeled overhead, calling sharply, and Aoife shielded her eyes to watch it settle on a distant stack of columns rising out of the sea like a broken staircase. "What's that one called?"

"That's the Chimney Tops," Cormac said. "Long ago, there's a story that Spanish sailors mistook them for the chimneys of Dunluce Castle and fired their cannons at them, thinking they'd found the castle at last."

Aoife laughed. "Did they hit anything?"

"Only the rocks, from what I've heard, and the rocks didn't much mind." Cormac's eyes crinkled. "Of course, there's an older story too, one my own grandmother told me on this very spot. She said a giant named Finn McCool built this causeway himself, stone by stone, so he could walk across the sea to fight a rival giant in Scotland."

"Do you believe that one?" Aoife asked, half teasing.

"I believe it's a grand story," Cormac said carefully, "and grand stories matter too, even when the rocks themselves have their own true and equally remarkable tale to tell. Science explains how the stones came to be shaped this way; the old story explains why people needed to imagine a giant in the first place, to make sense of something so strange and enormous."

They sat for a while in comfortable silence, listening to the water slap and hiss against the columns, watching the tide creep further up the honeycombed shore. Aoife noticed a group of tourists further along, photographing what looked like a perfectly circular depression worn into one of the flatter stones.

"The Wishing Chair," Cormac said, following her gaze. "Sit in it and make a wish, they say, though I've never had one come true yet."

"Maybe you're wishing for the wrong things," Aoife said.

Cormac laughed properly then, a warm sound that carried over the wind. "Maybe I am. Go on, then. Go and try your luck. I'll wait here and mind the sandwiches."

Aoife scrambled off across the columns towards the distant chair-shaped stone, her trainers slapping against basalt older than almost anything else she had ever touched, while behind her, Cormac settled back against the rock and watched the tide continue its slow, patient work on the shore his grandmother had once walked, and her grandmother before that.