The Giant’s Causeway itself is the best-known legend on this coast, but it’s far from the only one. Some of these stories are pure folklore; a surprising number turn out to be real events, softened and reshaped by a few decades of retelling.
Finn M’Cool and the giant’s boot
The legend: Finn M’Cool, a giant, built the Causeway as a dry crossing to Scotland to reach his rival Benandonner, without getting his feet wet. As evidence, storytellers point to Fingal’s Cave on the Scottish island of Staffa — a matching basalt formation across the water, “Fingal” being a variant of “Finn.” A giant boot, left behind at Port Noffer, has even had its owner’s height “calculated” at over fifty feet.
There’s a real thread underneath it: Finn M’Cool is the anglicised name of Fionn mac Cumhaill, a genuine figure of Irish mythology, whose exploits were carried down through generations of oral storytelling attributed to his son, Oisín. In 1761, Scottish writer James Macpherson claimed to have discovered ancient manuscripts of Ossian (Oisín) detailing Fingal’s story — the resulting book was a sensation, though the original manuscripts were never produced, and the whole episode remains a famous literary controversy.
Port na Spaniagh and the Girona
“Port na Spaniagh” — inlet of the Spanish — marks the spot where the Girona, a three-masted galleon from the 1588 Spanish Armada, was wrecked while trying to make a run for Scotland. She was carrying an estimated 1,200–1,300 people that night, most of them survivors already picked up from other wrecked Armada ships; only a handful made it ashore alive.
Local tradition always held that gold had washed up along the shore — not entirely wrong: in 1832, a hoard of silver coins was found under a flat stone nearby on Feigh Mountain. But the Girona herself stayed lost for 379 years, finally located in 1967 by Belgian diver Robert Sténuit, who found the correct spot using the very name “Port na Spaniagh” printed in a local guidebook. Her recovered treasure is now on permanent display at the Ulster Museum in Belfast.
Port Coon Cave’s hermit
Port Coon Cave, near the Causeway, has its own quiet legend: a disillusioned friar from Bonamargy Friary near Ballycastle (founded in 1485) supposedly retreated to live in the cave’s furthest, driest chamber, vowing never again to take food from a human hand. According to the story, he survived for years on fish delivered to him by mermaids — or, in a gentler version, by a seal.
The Vanishing Lake
On the Ballycastle–Cushendun road sits Loughareema, better known as the Vanishing Lake — a real and genuinely strange phenomenon. The lake periodically drains away completely through a bed of inconsistent clay, then refills once the natural blockage clears, sometimes within hours.
Local legend attaches a ghost story to the spot: a wedding party drowned there after their carriage was swept into water hidden by darkness. That story has real roots. On 30 September 1898, Colonel John Magee McNeill drowned in Loughareema after the lake flooded the road and his horses panicked, pulling his carriage into the water — reported at the time by the Coleraine Chronicle. His coachman and both horses died with him. Within a few decades, the true story of a genuine tragedy had folded into the more romantic tale still told today.
The Grey Man
Along the Grey Man’s Path at Fair Head — and, oddly, ten miles west at the mouth of the River Bush near Bushfoot — local tradition describes a cloaked, giant apparition with a cloven foot, said to appear out of sea mist or floodwater. A recorded account in the Ulster Journal of Archaeology even places a sighting at Bushfoot in 1858, witnessed by two named local men during a river in spate. Like most good local ghost stories, it carries a practical warning underneath the folklore: take care crossing water in flood, and take care on the cliffs in mist.