Today, walking onto the Giant’s Causeway itself is free — you only pay for the National Trust visitor centre and car park if you use it. That wasn’t always guaranteed. In the 1890s, a legal battle over exactly this question played out in a Dublin courtroom, and it turned on some genuinely dramatic local theatre first.
A hotel rivalry becomes a property dispute
By the mid-1890s, two hotels sat at the Causeway: Kane’s Royal Hotel and the Causeway Hotel, leased by the Traill brothers of tramway fame from Hugh Lecky, who held the land under an old fee-farm grant dating back to 1738. The tramway had carried 100,000 visitors to the Causeway in 1896 alone — a huge jump in footfall, and a huge prize for whoever controlled access to it.
A syndicate connected to Lecky and the Causeway Hotel decided to assert ownership outright: fence off the site and charge admission, treating what most people assumed was open countryside as private property.
The staged confrontation
To force the issue into a courtroom, opponents of the scheme deliberately provoked a test case. On 3 and 5 October 1896, Samuel C. M’Elroy — a Ballymoney man and editor of the Ballymoney Free Press — walked onto the disputed ground with a Mr Ewart, daring the local RIC sergeant to stop them. “Are you the notorious sergeant?” Ewart reportedly greeted him. “I am a native of the County Antrim, and the Causeway is as much mine as it is yours. No offence to you, Sergeant.”
The stunt worked. Public outrage followed fast — subscription funds were raised, defence meetings held in Belfast, and Rev Thomas Mills wrote an indignant poem, “The Giant in His Causeway” (1896), damning the syndicate as “usurpers” barring “those beauties from the eyes of men.”
Two weeks in the Court of Chancery
The case reached Dublin’s Court of Chancery in 1897, running two full weeks of testimony in front of the Vice-Chancellor. It’s a remarkable cross-section of the Causeway community: guides, boatmen, hoteliers, an eighty-year-old Presbyterian minister who’d first visited as a boy in 1827, a retired RIC sergeant, and a parade of elderly Aird residents recalling exactly where sheep had grazed and seaweed had been cut going back to the 1820s. My own great-great-grandmother, Mary Jane Kane, travelled to Dublin to give evidence for the defence.
The barristers — Serjeant Jellett and The MacDermot — picked over decades of local custom: who had repaired which stretch of road, who had ever seen a gate locked, whether “the Quality” and ordinary visitors used different paths, and whether an 1814 grand jury order to repair a road “between a rock called Stokan and that part of the Causeway adjoining Port Noffer” proved a public right of way had existed all along.
The verdict — and the twist
On 29 April 1897, the Vice-Chancellor ruled for the syndicate. Reliance on general custom was, he found, “bad law” — the defence hadn’t tied the claimed right to any specific parish or district, and repairs carried out by the landowners over the years actually pointed toward permission, not an established public right. The public, legally, had lost.
But the judgment came with a condition that mattered more in practice than the ruling itself. The Vice-Chancellor added that he would “regret” seeing visitors excluded from “a place so celebrated,” and hoped any admission charge would stay “moderate and reasonable.” It did: sixpence for children, a shilling for adults, with free access preserved for locals — a compromise that held for the next sixty-four years, until the railings finally came down and the National Trust began taking over management of the site in the 1960s.
The public had technically lost the Causeway Case. In every way that mattered to a visitor, they got the Causeway back anyway.