Search of Hellboy…. Visit to the Giant‘s Causeway
For the past seven years, the GCSE Geography field trip has been an excursion to the North Antrim coast, to the Giant‘s Causeway to investigate tourism and the impact it is having on the environment. This year, added excitement was in the air, as our own Causeway recently featured in a major motion picture - Hellboy II, the search for the Golden Army. In the movie, our very own giant, Finn McCool was hiding the Golden Army buried beneath the Causeway. So, our quest had an extra dimension - the search for Hellboy amongst the tourists.
A long journey began at school at 9am and and having taken in the wonderful sights along the M2, including Sandyknowes roundabout, Ballymoney and Ballymena, we arrived in good time at the Causeway Car Park. With clipboards and equipment divvied out, the girls braced themselves against the wind and headed out for an exciting day of field study - while the teachers headed out for some coffee and scones!
The girls really threw themselves into their tasks and it was with great amusement to the teachers that Zara and Melissa seemed to be being asked to pay for some eager Chinese visitors filling their questionnaires by posing for photographs. They really were a hit - or maybe they were being hit on! Who would have thought when watching the spectacular sights of the Beijing Olympics, that Chinese tourists would be taking in our spectacular sights in Northern Ireland!
The beautiful day was of course rain-free, which is a pre-condition of every Geography fieldtrip organised by Mrs Chisim. The strong breeze only added to the beauty, with the waves being whipped up over the rocks (and wrecking all of the coiffed, straight hair of the students!)
We all searched high and low across the Causeway. We met Finn‘s Granny, we saw where he had left behind his boot, when he sat in his wishing chair and we could have convinced ourselves that we even heard him knock out a tune on his organ to serenade his lonely camel. However hard we looked though, there was no sign of Finn himself or his new friend Hellboy. Ah well, maybe next year, when we embark on our next visit……
