Natural Block Paving
The connection is “block paving”, or at least the effect of it. It’s a bit of a tenuous link, but then the areas in each photo are used by people for walking on and the paving is fairly regularly shaped. The scene was originated on slide film in the late 1990s during a visit to the Isle of Staffa, Scotland, which of course features Fingal’s Cave.
The block paving effect is probably better at the Giant’s Causeway in Northern Ireland, with more regular hexagonal shapes, but don’t ask me why! It’s a good day out travelling to Staffa, by boat, but the Giant’s Causeway, is more accessible…despite the fact that folklore says these two areas are linked! In fact there’s lots to see in that part of Northern Ireland (where I was a student in the 1980s) and I would urge people to travel the length of the Antrim coastline.
Most people on my trip to Staffa stayed on the lower levels near to the sea and of course ventured into Fingal’s Cave. I did this too, but also decided to climb to the top of a cliff (easy enough because the island slopes up to the cliff from one end) to see if I could get an aerial photo of the rock formation. The only difficult part was achieving all this in the one hour allowed ashore. On a tourist trip in the late 1990s such an aerial photo would always feature people, but I suppose I could now clone them out! I’ve cropped the photo a bit simply because it helps with the composition….something which I couldn’t achieve precisely whilst leaning quite far over the cliff edge with the camera held in my outstretched hand. The presence of vegetation in the bottom left hand corner is testament to the fact that I need a longer arm…although a monopod would’ve helped…which I don’t own. I could clone it out, but I won’t because it reminds me of the fact that I nearly didn’t make it to the next part of the boat trip!
Since this was taken around 20 years ago, I wonder if the behaviour of the tourists seen here would be different nowadays? The chap taking the photo, probably using the camera in self-timer mode, might have a selfie-stick instead. If there’s a phone signal in this remote area, people would probably be checking Facebook and Twitter etc. Perhaps that’s the advantage of going to the Giant’s Causeway instead.