This spectacular rock formation – Northern Ireland's only Unesco World Heritage site – is one of Ireland's most impressive and atmospheric landscape features, a vast expanse of regular, closely packed, hexagonal stone columns looking for all the world like the handiwork of giants. The phenomenon is explained in the Giant's Causeway Visitor Experience, housed in a state-of-the-art ecofriendly building half-hidden in the hillside above the sea.

　　Visiting the Giant's Causeway itself is free of charge but you pay to use the car park on a combined ticket with the visitor centre; parking-only tickets aren't available.

　　From the centre it's an easy 10- to 15-minute walk downhill to the Causeway itself, but a more interesting approach is to follow the cliff-top path then descend the Shepherd's Steps. For the less mobile, a minibus shuttles from the visitors centre to the Causeway (£2 return).

　　The lower coastal path leads east as far as the Amphitheatre viewpoint at Port Reostan, passing impressive rock formations such as the Organ (a stack of vertical basalt columns resembling organ pipes).

　　You can also follow the cliff-top path east past the Chimney Stacks headland as far as Dunseverick or beyond.