Before the National Trust visitor centre and its audio guides, a visit to the Giant’s Causeway meant meeting one of the Causeway guides — a trade that ran for roughly 150 years, peaking at around thirty guides working the site in the early twentieth century.
Not everyone loved them
Nineteenth-century visitors left a mixed record. Thackeray, who stayed at the Causeway Hotel in 1845, described being “suddenly surrounded by savage-looking men” and manhandled into a boat for a costly cruise he hadn’t really wanted. Mr and Mrs S.C. Hall, visiting in 1840, wrote that guides were “quite as numerous… as those at Killarney and Glendalough,” while travel writer Edwin Waugh compared them in 1860 to “skirmishers thrown out by a hostile army,” lying in wait along the road from Bushmills. By 1890, French travel writer Madame Marie Anne de Bouvet was complaining about “the infestation” of guides soliciting for business — a level of persistence she said she hadn’t met anywhere else in Ireland.
Not every account was hostile, though. Anne Plumtree, researching mineralogy in 1814 and 1815, was guided by John Currie — the most celebrated guide of his era, “civil, obliging and intelligent,” by her account, who went to real trouble to find her good specimens to study. Currie later wrote his own description of the Causeway, printed as an appendix in later editions of Dr William Hamilton’s book on the site.
Guide-speak
Much of the folk vocabulary visitors still hear today — the Wishing Chair, the Giant’s Organ, the Amphitheatre, Lord Antrim’s Parlour, the Honeycomb, the Giant’s Boot, the Loom — most likely originated with the guides themselves, weaving names into the rock formations to match the Finn M’Cool legend as they told it. In the off-season, guides carved miniature souvenir Wishing Chairs and shillelaghs from blackthorn cut in the hedges, sold with a “Souvenir of the Giant’s Causeway” transfer and a green ribbon tied on for good measure.
Guides worked in tandem with local boatmen, who rowed visitors out to the sea caves in drontheims — sturdy open boats, clinker-built with a design tracing back to Trondheim, Norway. Port Coon Cave, with its famous echo, was the standard trip; Pigeon Rock Cave and Runkerry Cave further west were only attempted on exceptionally calm days.
The Guides’ War
The trade wasn’t always peaceful. When the Traill brothers took over the Causeway Hotel in 1884 and built the electric tramway, they engaged their own guides, based at the hotel and positioned right at the new tram terminus — Macnaghten land the rival hotel’s guides weren’t allowed to work. Since the tram was carrying 100,000 visitors a year by 1896, whoever met passengers first got first crack at their custom.
Guides not attached to the Causeway Hotel were effectively pushed to Kane’s Royal Hotel instead, and the two camps competed hard — dueling newspaper advertisements, porters directing arriving visitors down conflicting paths, and, by most accounts, the occasional fight, usually breaking out ironically after a good day’s takings had put money in everyone’s pocket for a drink. The feud ran until 1910, when my grandfather bought the Causeway Hotel and reunited the two rival hotels — and their guides — under one roof.
The last of the guides
Motorised transport slowly ended the trade’s original business model. As cars began arriving from the 1910s onward, guides adapted by meeting them at the road junction known as The Nook instead of the old walking routes. By the 1940s, the trade had dwindled to a handful of characters — among them Johnny McLernon and Joe Mornin, who spent their days on “the form” outside The Nook, rolling tobacco, carving Wishing Chairs, and greeting visitors with well-worn charm. Their favourite trick was warning departing tourists the tram was “just pulling out now” to hurry them along — harmless mischief that always worked. Mass motor-coach tourism after 1949 finished the job the tram had started, and the guiding trade, in its old freelance form, faded out for good.