Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
Figure 6.3 The Giant's Causeway, Co. Antrim, Ireland, viewed from
the east (fromWilliam Hamilton Drummond, The Giants' Causeway,
a Poem (1811)).
region were volcanic in origin. Whitehurst suggested that the colum-
nar basalts formed as the molten basalt cooled. In the same year the
Reverend William Hamilton (1755-1797) published an important and
influential memoir entitled Letters Concerning the Northern Coast of
the County of Antrim which advanced Desmarest's theory of the
igneous origin of the Causeway rocks and in which he accurately
described the geology of the coast. He was one of the founders of the
Royal Irish Academy in 1785 and in 1790 he became rector and a local
magistrate of an isolatedDonegal parish. He wasmurdered in 1797 after
local unrest, which would culminate in the 1798 rebellion. He left a
widow and nine children who were granted monies by Parliament.
While Kirwan was loud in his rejection of Hutton and
Desmarest's views on the origin of basalt, the Reverend William
Richardson (1740-1820) was thunderous, and perhaps with good rea-
son, for he actually spent some of the year living at Portrush, on the
Antrim coast close to the Causeway. William Richardson had been
elected a Fellow of Trinity College Dublin in 1766, took holy orders
and eventually resigned in September 1783 on taking up the living of
the parish of Clonfeacle in County Tyrone. Through his membership
of the Royal Irish Academy he would have become familiar with
the arguments surrounding the geology of the Giant's Causeway.
