Making the field site

In 1688 Sir Robert Redding, natural philosopher and member of the Royal Society,Footnote ¹¹ heard of a wonderful rock formation in County Antrim, which he subsequently reported to the Royal Society. At the society's meeting on 23 January 1689 two letters were read from Sir Robert. The first concerned freshwater pearl fishing,Footnote ¹² while the second informed the society about ‘ye Giants Causey’. A summary of this letter, the earliest known account of the Giant's Causeway, survives in the society's minutes:

Although much of the seventeenth-century mythology that surrounded the Giant's Causeway has been lost, it is apparent that the local people interpreted it very differently from natural philosophers, whose accounts briefly and dismissively referenced the local tales of giants and demons as formative forces. The site's Irish name, Clochán na bhFomharaigh, translates as ‘the stepping stones of the Fomorii’, the evil, misshapen and violent gods of Irish myth.Footnote ¹⁴ It may be that Redding's appellation ‘Giants Causey’ was an English approximation of the original Irish. It is against these early, localized, forms of knowing the Giant's Causeway that the enquiries by Redding and those who followed him should be understood. Having caught the collective eye of natural philosophers in Dublin and London, the Giant's Causeway would no longer be just a place of folklore but also a site for philosophy. It became incorporated into much wider knowledge networks and discourses. Under the aegis of natural philosophy the columns would be observed, investigated, experimented upon, discussed, written about, drawn, collected and given new meanings in the coming decade. Although it seems likely that it was the local tales of gigantic architecture that led to Redding's interest, the old folklore surrounding the Giant's Causeway was seen as scarcely worth recording by the newly arrived, rational, enquirers into Nature.

Kohler has argued that field science is a ‘practice of place’,Footnote ¹⁵ an activity in which the deliberate demarcation of a geographical area for scientific study is a fundamental element. It is the very particularity of the site that gives it value as an object of study. The ‘vast quantity of Hexagonall Pillars of stone … regularly ranged and fitted one to the other’ gave to the Giant's Causeway philosophical value for the members of the Royal Society, who were fascinated with natural oddities. Redding's letter demarcated the Giant's Causeway as an object for study, carving it out from its surrounding landscape and associated mythologies. It was reconceptualized as an object and place of philosophical discourse and brought into the discursive space of the Royal Society. Bringing the Giant's Causeway into circulation among virtuosi in this way was an important aspect of its constitution as a field site, since the field could not exist outside, or independently of, other spaces. As Felix Driver has observed, ‘The field … is not just “there”; it is produced and re-produced through both physical movement across a landscape and other sorts of cultural work in a variety of sites.’Footnote ¹⁶

In March 1689 Redding died. If he had ever had any intention or desire to collect more information about the Causeway it remained unfulfilled. Furthermore, the momentous events of the Williamite war in Ireland from 1689 to 1691 disrupted any philosophizing about the ‘Giants Causey’ and it was not until the summer of 1692 that another visit to the site was made. This visit was reported to Sir Richard Bulkeley, who sent a letter about the formation to the Royal Society in April 1693, rekindling interest in the Giant's Causeway among natural philosophers.Footnote ¹⁷ By the end of that decade four further accounts and two engraved pictures of it had been published in the Philosophical Transactions.Footnote ¹⁸ These visits and reports helped to highlight, then fix, the Giant's Causeway as a philosophical landscape.

Knowing nature at a distance: eyewitnesses and proxy fieldworkers

Richard Bulkeley's and Thomas Molyneux's papers on the Giant's Causeway were written at a distance from the field site, not from personal on-site observations. They were produced on the basis of eyewitness reports and other proxies for the field such as specimens and drawings, an indication that among seventeenth-century virtuosi, travelling into the field in order to experience something at first hand was not a necessary part of knowledge-making. It was felt that one could wander through and understand the universe better in a museum or library.Footnote ¹⁹ This attitude complicated the virtuosi's study of nature. The remainder of this essay teases out the complexities of their relationship with the field. Instead of seeing for themselves, natural philosophers frequently relied on others for the collection of data, which they would then warrant on the basis of their knowledge of the informant's social standing and trustworthiness. It was believed that gentlemen would have nothing to gain by wilfully propagating inaccurate reports, so would not do so. This raised profound issues of trust in, and the reliability of, reporters.Footnote ²⁰ This section considers the role of eyewitnesses and proxy fieldworkers in shaping seventeenth-century comprehension of the Giant's Causeway.

While Bulkeley and Thomas Molyneux knew their informants, their readers may not, so needed to be assured of these reports’ veracity. Bulkeley was careful to give his eyewitness's credentials before relating their information. He informed readers that he was ‘a person that was rei compos, perhaps peritus, a Scholar (a Master of Arts in Cambridge) and a Traveller, who went on purpose the last Summer with the present Bishop of Derry to see it.’Footnote ²¹ Bulkeley's witness ‘was in possession of facts’ and ‘perhaps an expert’, and being a traveller was obviously a gentleman, able to afford the time and expense travel entailed. His accompaniment by the Anglican Bishop of Derry, William King, would have enhanced the credibility of Bulkeley's claims. Deeply sceptical, however, of the Royal Society's project in advancing knowledge and their publication of trivial or outré things as facts in the Philosophical Transactions,Footnote ²² King would later suggest that the compiler of the Transactions, Sir Hans Sloane, was less concerned with verifying accounts than with their sensationalism. In King's anonymously published The Transactioneer, a parody of the Transactions, the ‘Transactioneer’ (a caricature of Sloane) revealed, ‘I rely so much upon the sincerity of my Correspondents that I cannot tell how to disbelieve [them] … I am not inclined to destrust [sic] Mankind.’Footnote ²³ When asked, ‘pray what Reasons can be given to justifie the sincerity of your Correspondents’, the Transactioneer replied, ‘Reason! Psha! I don't trouble my self to enquire after the Reason of every thing that's told me; if I should, I should have Work enough to find Reasons for every thing that's Communicated in the Transactions.’Footnote ²⁴ These accusations of laxity in the editorial standards of the Philosophical Transactions incensed the Royal Society. However, problems of verifiability and credibility would always manifest themselves in a field report about something new, distant and previously unseen, making ‘trust in [the reporter's] moral integrity and trust in his perceptual accuracy’Footnote ²⁵ of vital importance. Thomas Molyneux, introduced as a ‘Fellow of the Colledge of Physicians, and of the Royal Society’,Footnote ²⁶ noted that his information was garnered from ‘my very honoured Friend, Dr. St. George Ash, now Lord Bishop of Clogher’, and from ‘A Gentleman of my Acquaintance in those Parts’.Footnote ²⁷ The latter was asked to dig into the ground at the bottom of a pillar, to see how far down it went, and reported that he dug

Molyneux's personal knowledge of his informants permitted him to report on their findings with confidence, while his, Foley's and Bulkeley's reputations enabled those reading their reports to believe them, even if King's charges were well-founded. As Shapin has argued, for the virtuosi to know about nature in the seventeenth century they had to know about people: they could not have thing-knowledge without people-knowledge. Unlike the laboratory, where philosophers worked in close proximity with their laborants, the philosophers’ knowledge about the field was made at a distance from the place of data acquisition, the field site itself, a distance bridged by eyewitnesses in whom trust was required if their reports were to be believed.Footnote ²⁹ It was through people-knowledge that witnesses became the surrogate eyes of Bulkeley and the other savants in Dublin and London and extended their gaze into a remote part of Ireland.

After the publication of his letter on the Giant's Causeway in 1693, Bulkeley sent a questionnaire to Samuel Foley in which he solicited observations of what he deemed relevant, in order to clear up ambiguities in previous descriptions. Questionnaires were a common method used by virtuosi to generate knowledge at a distance, ensuring commonality of observation and making reports of phenomena less haphazard.Footnote ³⁰ They were intended to discipline or calibrate witnesses and their senses, and can be thought of as a means to turn eyewitnesses into remote sensing instruments. Bulkeley's questions, nine in total, published along with Foley's answers, asked of such matters as

• Q. 1. Whether any of the Pillars are Hexagons, or whether there be any Squares, or whether they be all Pentagons only?

• Q. 3. Whether the Natural tops of these Pillars have any gravings upon them, or striate lines, or are naturally smooth?

• Q. 7. What may be supposed to be the number of those Pillars? (To which Foley replied, ‘We guess they cannot be so few as One Hundred Thousand’.)Footnote ³¹

Foley was careful to authenticate his observations and give them an immediacy that Bulkeley's account had lacked, noting that his answers were actually written down ‘when we were upon the Causway’.Footnote ³² The visit also led Foley to write his own account of the Giant's Causeway, presented to the Royal Society at a meeting on 27 June 1694. The minutes recorded that ‘the subject being very Curious, and also very accurately handled [Foley's letter] was ordered to be Inserted in the Transactions’.Footnote ³³

Sighting the Giant's Causeway: pictures and specimens

Reliance on eyewitness accounts and fieldwork by proxy was not the only means by which natural philosophers in Dublin and London could know about the Giant's Causeway. They also used pictures and specimens to generate important observational data about the Giant's Causeway at a distance from the field. These proxies provided a means for reproducing the field site in other places. They effectively enabled virtuosi to verify the eyewitness accounts of the phenomenon by being eyewitnesses themselves. Pictures were an important instrument for seeing at a distance;Footnote ³⁴ like a telescope, pictures brought geographically distant objects closer into the very libraries and drawing rooms of natural philosophers, where things could be discussed in comfort. In the form of ink and paper, large immobile objects could be successfully transported to and reproduced in other places. Through the medium of the picture philosophers could visit and visualize the field. Such a strategy for remote fieldwork was soon deployed at the Giant's Causeway, since reproducing it in paper-space provided a technique for mobilizing the formation and rendering it visible in other places. Specimens functioned in the same way, although they were not in themselves reproducible.

The first drawing of the Giant's Causeway was made by Christopher Cole from Coleraine, a town about ten miles away.Footnote ³⁵ There is no evidence to suggest that Cole's picture of the Giant's Causeway was commissioned. Cole may have suggested to Foley that he could draw it for him. Owen Lloyd of the Dublin Philosophical Society noted to Richard Waller at the Royal Society that

However, Cole visited the Causeway on 29 March 1694 and sent his picture to Dublin the next day where it was engraved by Edwin Sandys. After further delays it was sent to London for publication in the Philosophical Transactions.Footnote ³⁷ This engraving (Figure 1) accompanied Foley's and Thomas Molyneux's 1694 papers on the Causeway in the Philosophical Transactions. Foley claimed it would ‘make the whole much more Intelligible’.Footnote ³⁸

Figure 1.

Christopher Cole, ‘A Draught of the Gyants Cawsway which Lyes near Pengorehead in the County of Antrim’, Philosophical Transactions (1694), 18. © The Royal Society.

Brian Ford has noted that scientific illustrations are both didactic and a record of the state of contemporary knowledge.Footnote ³⁹ However, they are today often treated by historians of science as picturesque images of little epistemic significance.Footnote ⁴⁰ As Foley acknowledged, Cole's drawing was intended to inform natural philosophers about the Giant's Causeway and to deepen their understanding of it. So its pedagogical purpose should not be undervalued. Many of the picture's viewers would never have seen such a landscape before either in reality or on paper. Only one other image of columnar basalt had been published before, in Conrad Gesner's De omni rerum fossilium genere in 1565, which showed a cluster of polygonal basalt columns dislocated from their landscape context, some of which had pointed, crystal-like ends.Footnote ⁴¹ That Cole's Causeway image was valued as a means to knowledge in this period can be seen from its inclusion in the Philosophical Transactions and from the Dublin Philosophical Society's subsequent attempts to commission a second, improved, one. However, as a record of contemporary knowledge Cole's drawing is perhaps of more value now than it was then. It illustrates the geological features of the Causeway and surrounding coast that had caught the eye of late seventeenth-century visitors: the Giant's Causeway itself, the polygonal nature of its component stones, its relation to the cliffs, the ‘Looms’ (the Giant's Organ) and the loose blocks of basalt rubble that lay on the shore. This selective recording of particular features accounts for the drawing's abstract appearance.

Cole's chosen perspective is noteworthy: there was no possible single viewpoint from which he could have obtained the perspective used, which gives the viewer a bird's-eye view of the formation. Closer inspection of the drawing suggests that Cole used a double perspective, drawing the Giant's Causeway landscape from two viewpoints, not one. One of these viewpoints was from the top of Aird Snout, the headland behind the Causeway, which was used to draw the surface of the Grand Causeway. This is apparent in the drawing from the close correspondence of the outline shape of Cole's Causeway with the landform when seen from Aird Snout and from the progressively smaller polygons towards the end of the Causeway, a perspectival impossibility if the picture's bird's-eye viewpoint is assumed. The second viewpoint was towards the seaward end of the Causeway, Cole presumably having inverted the drawing made from the summit of Aird Snout and then sketched in the surrounding slopes. It is possible that other viewpoints were used to draw the Looms and three-dimensional rendering of the west side of the Causeway. Foley's comments on Cole's drawing suggest that this was indeed the technique used to produce the view, and they also demonstrate that the artist was struggling to find a pictorial language in which to depict the formation:

This is not surprising; no one had previously attempted visually to represent the Giant's Causeway and there were no established visual conventions for geological formations, such as the maps and sections now taken for granted by geologists. Although the concept of landscape painting had been established in Britain in the early seventeenth century,Footnote ⁴³ there was as yet no firm visual vocabulary in which to express an actual, philosophical landscape such as the Giant's Causeway, since idealized or ‘classical’ landscapes were preferred to realistic depiction. Thus Cole had to make a decision as to whether he should draw it as a map (‘a Survey or Platform’) or a topographical landscape (‘a Prospect’), or somehow combine these two representational modes. He chose the latter, combining multiple viewpoints and ignoring certain features to produce his ‘Draught’. Perhaps the picture evolved as he drew it, out of a frustration that he could not convey what was required using one viewpoint. A map could not show the depth of the columns. Lacking a convention for representing elevation, this would obscure the Causeway's relation to the surrounding cliffs. Conversely, there was no single viewpoint from which the formation and its surroundings could be comprehended in their entirety as a landscape picture or prospect. Looking at it from the shore to the east or west would not show the polygonal cross sections of the columns, while viewing it from Aird Snout would give no impression of the depth of the columns. Thus the result was a mix of the semi-oblique aerial view (a common cartographic technique from the sixteenth centuryFootnote ⁴⁴) with a topographical representation of the landscape.

Considered as a rhetorical device, rather than precise reproduction, Cole's drawing becomes of greater significance. Labelling it as ‘a crude aerial view’Footnote ⁴⁵ obscures its importance. It could persuade a distant audience of the significance of the Giant's Causeway as a field and, importantly for those who had not visited, it allowed them to ‘see’ the formation. A small map of the north Antrim coast was inset into the engraving, although it was drawn originally on a separate sheet. This served to locate the phenomenon in relation to known places and so inscribed it in space, helping to site the unsighted, while the large drawing of the stones sighted the site.Footnote ⁴⁶ Furthermore, Cole's map and landscape painting complemented each other: the map facilitated access to the field, while the painting facilitated contemplation and comprehension of the site.Footnote ⁴⁷

Natural philosophers had to accept that Cole's drawing was an accurate depiction of the Causeway for it to have any significance in their discourses. Samuel Foley noted that Cole was a local collector,Footnote ⁴⁸ and he and Bulkeley endorsed his picture. Bulkeley wrote to Martin Lister: ‘for a more perfect understanding of it I must refer you to the two draughts [Cole's drawing and map] which are sent to the Royal Society’.Footnote ⁴⁹ However, in a rather sycophantic letter to Owen Lloyd of the Dublin Philosophical Society, Cole had confessed, ‘It's true I am unknown’, but hoped that

Cole aspired to the status of a natural philosopher and sought to integrate himself with learned society in Dublin. In the light of his letter to Lloyd his Causeway drawing can be further seen as a rhetorical device, intended to persuade the members of the Dublin Philosophical Society of his worth to them in their work. He requested that the members of the Dublin Philosophical Society send him ‘printed enquiries’ and desired that they

However, his attempts were unsuccessful and he never achieved inclusion in the Dublin Philosophical Society. Nevertheless, his depiction of the Giant's Causeway was published in the Philosophical Transactions. The importance attributed to Cole's drawing by Foley and other natural philosophers, coupled with its expensive engraving and reproduction,Footnote ⁵² attest to the epistemic value accorded it in this period.

Despite its initially acknowledged accuracy, shortcomings in Cole's drawing were soon realized. Thomas Molyneux later commented that it was an unreliable guide to the appearance of the Giant's Causeway, ‘as being done by the Hand of one who was no extraordinary Artist’,Footnote ⁵³ while Cole himself had admitted that ‘the art of man cannot do it like the original’.Footnote ⁵⁴ Consequently, Edwin Sandys, ‘an excellent artist’ and ‘a good Master in Designing and Drawing of Prospects’, was commissioned by the Dublin Philosophical Society in 1696 to draw the Giant's Causeway and carefully instructed to ‘take the genuine and accurate Figure of the whole Rock, with the natural Posture of the Hills and Country about it for some distance’ while ‘upon the Place’.Footnote ⁵⁵

Sandys returned bearing A True Prospect of the Giants Cawsway (Figure 2). Where Cole had wrestled with the concept of drawing a philosophical landscape, Sandys opted for a more conventional topographical landscape, choosing a single viewpoint on the Stookan to the west of the Causeway. Labelling on the picture referred the viewer to a key that clarified various points and guided the viewer around the virtual field site. Sandys's painting was a more complete rendering of the Giant's Causeway and its context in comparison with Cole's: new features were shown in the cliffs, such as the Chimneys and a hint of stratification in the farthest headland, and an outcrop of horizontally inclined columns on Aird Snout. He also included two inset vignettes that gave detailed insights into certain aspects of the formation, a different solution to the problem of representing the Giant's Causeway landscape completely. Together with the main picture, these vignettes helped to distinguish between what the Causeway looked like and what it consisted of. The vignette of polygon types was felt by Thomas Molyneux to be

He reproduced it in his 1698 paper, revising his description of the polygonal shapes found in the Causeway stones accordingly. Interestingly, the engraved version published in the Philosophical Transactions in 1697 depicted several people in the lower right-hand corner. Among the fishermen, cattle and sheep, a pair of fieldworkers were drawn, engaged in viewing the Giant's Causeway, their tricorn hats and skirted coats suggesting that they were from the upper echelons of society. Populating the field space with these fieldworkers conceptually shifted the picture from one of a geological scene to one of a geological site.

Figure 2.

Edwin Sandys, A True Prospect of the Giants Cawsway near Pengore head in the County of Antrim, original ink and watercolour (1696). Photograph reproduced with the kind permission of the Trustees of the National Museums Northern Ireland.

Sandys's drawing of the Giant's Causeway also had its shortcomings, which led the Reverend William Hamilton to comment scornfully a century later,

A closer look at Sandys's drawing shows that the artist knew that these columns were not ‘stately forest trees’ but formed of the same kind of rock as the Giant's Causeway. The label for the Organ, ‘L’, reads, ‘The Orgins which are Pillars of ye same with ye Causway.’ The supposed ‘trees’ were not a deliberate glamorization of the landscape surrounding the Causeway, but rather show that the artist was struggling to depict these geological formations. It can be suggested that Sandys was trying to draw the rubbly entablature that caps the basaltic columns but was limited by his technical ability and the artistic tradition in which he worked, which had not yet developed a way of visually representing such rock.Footnote ⁵⁸ Nevertheless, Cole's and Sandys's utilization of various visual techniques enabled the reproduction of the Giant's Causeway in different sites, serving as Latourian ‘immutable mobiles’ of the field.Footnote ⁵⁹ They allowed it to be moved into other places such as Dublin and London, making it much more visible and thus more accessible to discourse in different locations. Engraving and publishing the drawings in the Philosophical Transactions increased their circulation even more. In a sense these images, and the specimens, became the Giant's Causeway, since many natural philosophers would see nothing else.

From the earliest period of research specimens of the Giant's Causeway were collected and circulated, forming another part of natural philosophy's remote knowledge base. While taken from natural things, specimens are artificial and constructed to meet particular needs.Footnote ⁶⁰ The first recorded collection of pieces of the Causeway for philosophical purposes was made by Samuel Foley, who took back to Dublin two column segments, which he and his colleagues called ‘joints’. There he measured them and studied their geometry, ‘which … Nature likewise observes in the formation of Crystals’.Footnote ⁶¹ There too Thomas Molyneux saw these specimens, and so was able to add to his accounts more details about the Causeway stones. He reported that the rock from the Giant's Causeway appeared to have the same properties as that of a touchstone, a small tablet of stone used for basic analysis of metal alloys.Footnote ⁶² While images enabled the appearance of the Giant's Causeway to be transmitted across space, specimens could additionally transmit other attributes: texture, colour, hardness, density and even scent could be sensed remotely through them. Reading Georgius Agricola's De Natura Fossilium, Thomas Molyneux had discovered a reference to ‘a sort of Marble’ found in Germany, the description of which seemed ‘to bear in several Respects, a great Analogy or Agreement with this Stone of the Giants Causway’.Footnote ⁶³ This stone emitted a distinctive smell when struck, as did the Causeway specimens: ‘I'm assured of from frequent Experiments, that the Marble of the Giants Causway, like these Stony Beams, when forcibly struck with another Stone or a Bar of Iron, sends forth a strong offensive Scent like Burnt Horn.’Footnote ⁶⁴

The Royal Society soon desired their own specimens of the Causeway, and, at their meeting on 20 October 1697, ‘The Society ordered a Letter to be wrote into Ireland praying a piece or joint of the Giants Causeway.’Footnote ⁶⁵ To this request William Molyneux replied,

This piece of the Giant's Causeway was carefully wrapped in canvas and dispatched to the Royal Society in late 1697. Suspecting that not everybody who handled the specimen would recognize its philosophical value, William Molyneux wrote advising them that it was on its way and warning them to ‘lay wait for it at your Custom House, London, or else such a rude trifle as that may be mislaid or lost’.Footnote ⁶⁷ The specimen was successfully received by the Royal Society in December 1697 and provoked some discussion at a meeting on the 22nd of that month. One Mr Wilson noted ‘that the joint of the Giant's Causeway was of the Ordinary blew Irish Stone capable of Polish, there being another kind not capable of it’.Footnote ⁶⁸ Further specimens were collected and by 1698 Thomas Molyneux possessed pairs of Causeway stones with three to eight sides. These specimens enabled him, while in Dublin, to compare pieces of the Causeway with pieces of columnar basalt from other parts of the Antrim coast, and he found that they were the same type of rock.Footnote ⁶⁹ Like Cole's and Sandys's illustrations, these specimens were also immutable mobiles of the Giant's Causeway and allowed the field site to be seen and reproduced in other places.

The Giant's Causeway in sites of accumulation

Thomas Molyneux made the first move towards a conceptual knowledge of the Giant's Causeway by proposing a classification of its constituent rock. He did not do so in the field, however, but in Dublin. All of the data on the Giant's Causeway – eyewitness accounts, illustrations, observations and specimens – were gathered into what Bruno Latour has termed a centre of accumulation. The Dublin Philosophical Society was an example. There data in the form of ‘immutable and combinable mobiles’ could be gathered from all over the world, juxtaposed and analysed, allowing scholars to roam through nature without leaving the building or the city.Footnote ⁷⁰ As John Evelyn commented, in such a space the philosopher could ‘name himself Cosmopolitan, or Habitant of the Universe’.Footnote ⁷¹ Using the evidence derived from the field site, contained in the eyewitness reports and in Cole's drawing, Thomas Molyneux initially set about disproving the contention that the Giant's Causeway was the ‘Workman-ship of Art and Mens Hands’,Footnote ⁷² as local mythologies held. He pointed to the facts of its situation, near to ‘precipitous Hills, not Accessible by Man without great difficulty’;Footnote ⁷³ the fact that it lost itself in the water and had no apparent use; the lack of any substance cementing the columns together, and of any tool marks; and the occurrence of ‘other parcels of the like Stone, which lye still in their Native Beds, as they were first produced in the adjoining Mountain’.Footnote ⁷⁴ Taken together, he thought that these observations were conclusive proof against the Causeway's ascription to giants.

Once he had proved what the Giant's Causeway was not, he discussed items to which it bore certain resemblances in an attempt to discover what it actually was, for

He compared the various descriptions of it with similar natural things which were in some ways analogous to it: ‘the several figured Stones already described by [other] Authors’,Footnote ⁷⁶ namely Entrochos and Astroites (both types of fossil crinoid), a touchstone, and Basaltes or basalt. For this he drew upon Boetius's Gemmarum et lapidium historia, and a paper by Martin Lister in the Philosophical Transactions which contained a plate illustrating various fossils. He also noted similarities of the Causeway's columns with reeds and bamboos, because their ‘joynted stems … seem to bear somewhat of Analogy or Resemblance to the Geniculated Mineral, or Rock-Plants we are speaking of’.Footnote ⁷⁷ This approach to determining what the Giant's Causeway might be was similar to that advocated by Nicolaus Steno, who had argued in 1669 that if

For Thomas Molyneux this was a valid method for elucidating the secrets of nature:

However, from the account and picture of some columnar basalt in Saxony published in Conrad Gesner's De omni rerum fossilium genere of 1565,Footnote ⁸⁰ Thomas Molyneux concluded that the rock of the Giant's Causeway was a species or form of Lapis Basaltes, which he classified as

Such was the overview of nature that a site of accumulation afforded Thomas Molyneux that he was able to classify the Giant's Causeway without having seen the actual Causeway for himself. Writing from such a position gave him more epistemic power than an eyewitness had when writing from the field. Surrounded by immutable and combinable mobiles in Dublin, he was able to compare descriptions of the Giant's Causeway with descriptions of similar natural things from other places, an achievement which could not be performed in the field by surrogate fieldworkers. His space gave him access to different data, and thus enabled his classification. In Dublin he could see new things from afar. Field proxies, such as texts, illustrations and specimens, allowed him in some respects to be an eyewitness of many fields. Molyneux had a sense of having seen the Giant's Causeway through such proxies. This is revealed by his contention that an anonymous critic who had had the temerity to dispute his claim that its rock was basalt had not seen the Giant's Causeway – neither, in fact, had Molyneux.Footnote ⁸²

Explaining the origin of the Giant's Causeway caused Thomas Molyneux some difficulty. He was equivocal about the value of proposing theories to account for it. He certainly scorned local beliefs in ‘Giants, Fairies, Dæmons, and such like Imaginary Causes’ as the originators of the Causeway.Footnote ⁸³ However, while he observed that its regularity ‘must certainly be the Architecture of the Regular Hand of Nature’,Footnote ⁸⁴ and declared that ‘the Giants Causway of Ireland may very well be esteemed one of the greatest Wonders, Nature, or the first Cause of all things has produced’,Footnote ⁸⁵ he urged caution when seeking for explanations of its formation:

Despite the greater epistemic value afforded to sites of accumulation compared with the field, by 1698 Thomas Molyneux, along with other natural philosophers such as Edward Lhuyd and John Woodward,Footnote ⁸⁷ was on the verge of newer ways of thinking about the field which would eventually give it more prominence in natural philosophy and later in the earth sciences. Thomas Molyneux acknowledged limitations in the view provided by the various proxies of the Giant's Causeway that he had used to construct his classification. He commented, revealingly, that he had deferred writing to the Royal Society in the hope that he would have been able to get to see it,

Such thinking affords greater epistemic value to the field site than to a centre of accumulation. Thomas Molyneux's desire to see the Giant's Causeway for himself in order more fully to understand it is comparable with his brother William's empiricist belief that sensory experience was the basis of knowledge. William Molyneux famously answered his eponymous philosophical problem negatively: would a blind man, having learned by touch to distinguish between a cube and a sphere and then regaining his vision, be able to distinguish between these forms by sight without first handling them?Footnote ⁸⁹ Even so, in their search for an understanding of earth processes, direct personal experience of the field remained the exception rather than the rule for natural philosophers until the last decades of the eighteenth century.Footnote ⁹⁰ This led Sir John Strange to lament in 1775 that

Not everybody agreed with Thomas Molyneux's classification of the Giant's Causeway. In February 1696 the Miscellaneous Letters, a short-lived journal of literature reviews and other philosophical contributions, published an anonymous letter which briefly discussed the formation.Footnote ⁹² Its author had in an earlier letter to the same journal promised an article on his observations about the Causeway,Footnote ⁹³ but having subsequently discovered the contributions about it in the Philosophical Transactions of 1694, ‘to which I can add but little’,Footnote ⁹⁴ he refocused his latest communication. However, he made a point of observing that he believed Thomas Molyneux had been mistaken in his classification of the Giant's Causeway as Lapis Basaltes:

Importantly, the anonymous author believed that the columns of the Giant's Causeway (‘this admirable Fossil’) were of organic origin, some sort of vitrified plant. This differed from Thomas Molyneux's definition of it as Lapis Basaltes, a mineral of inorganic origin. Nevertheless, despite this difference of opinion on the classification of the Causeway stones, he confirmed that the Giant's Causeway was indeed ‘an Original Fossil of a Stupendous Figure and Dimensions, and prove[d] the Art, Power, and Variety of Nature in her Subterraneous Workmanship, especially in her forming of figur'd Stones’.Footnote ⁹⁶ However, Thomas Molyneux would hear nothing of this alternative (organic) classification, and wrote angrily in the Philosophical Transactions,

The 1696 ‘letter from Dublin … giving an Account of some Petrifactions, with Animadversions thereupon’ was indeed anonymous. This conferred upon its author a position of power which a credited letter could not.Footnote ⁹⁸ It posed a threat to Thomas Molyneux's analysis of the Giant's Causeway data, since Molyneux could not use the intellectual status and experience of his opponent to discount this alternative classification. That Molyneux felt intellectually threatened can be seen from his publication of a second paper on the Giant's Causeway in 1698 and the ad hominem paragraph in it. This paper added little to existing knowledge, but merely reinforced and reiterated his earlier classification. The only new data it contained concerned the number of sides found on the columns: in 1694 he had numbered the sides from four to seven, and he now corrected this to between three and eight. This evidently worked: Thomas Molyneux's classification of the rock of the Giant's Causeway as (inorganic) basalt endured.

Who was Molyneux's anonymous disputant? It seems likely that the writer to the Miscellaneous Letters was St George Ashe. The earlier letter to which he referred was signed ‘S.G.A.’ and dated Dublin College, 18 December 1695Footnote ⁹⁹ – Ashe had been Provost of Trinity College since 1693. This is intriguing, for Ashe and Molyneux would have known each other well, since they were both members of the Dublin Philosophical Society. Furthermore, Molyneux had cited Ashe as one of his sources of first-hand observations on the Giant's Causeway in his 1698 account. Perhaps Molyneux's comment (‘which I am confident he had never seen’) was an attempt to deflect any suspicions that it was Ashe who was querying his classification. This would have discredited Molyneux's claims based on data supplied by Ashe. While it may have been that Molyneux simply did not know his disputer, this seems very unlikely. Given his and Ashe's proximity they would surely have talked about such things and consultation of the earlier letter would have supplied Molyneux with Ashe's initials. If indeed the anonymous disputer was Ashe, his disagreement with Molyneux over what the Causeway was is interesting and suggestive.

Conclusion

On 14 August 1708 Samuel Molyneux, son of William Molyneux and nephew of Thomas Molyneux, visited the Giant's Causeway during a tour of the north of Ireland.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ The day before, he and his entourage had travelled from Shane's Castle, County Antrim, and

His accommodation that night was no better: ‘Having taken a sufficient view of the Gyant's Causey’ he rode to Coleraine, where he stayed in a ‘drunken, Stinking Kennel’ of an inn.Footnote ¹⁰² For a man accustomed to a comfortable town house in Dublin, life in the field, gathering data for a proposed natural history of Ireland,Footnote ¹⁰³ was not a pleasant experience.

However, grubby villages and dirty inns were not the only spaces through which Samuel Molyneux had travelled on his way to the Giant's Causeway. His view of it was surely influenced by the geography of his childhood and the particular institutional and discursive spaces that he had passed through as a teenager (he was eighteen years old when he visited). In the garden of his Dublin home his father William had deposited specimens of its columns. The young Samuel had doubtless played upon them and marvelled at their shape. His uncle Thomas was the leading authority on the Causeway and he would likely have listened to his father and uncle conversing about it, and after his father's death in 1698 discussed it with his uncle, whose writings on it he had certainly read. He would also have seen the pictures and specimens of it that the Dublin Philosophical Society had commissioned and collected. But not only did these people and objects direct his attention to the Giant's Causeway, they also mediated his visit to it. He recorded that he brought with him to the Causeway copies of his uncle's 1698 paper and Sandys's painting, ‘and compared them both on the place as strictly as I could’, concluding,

Of note is the importance attached by Samuel Molyneux to imagery for understanding the earth. Indeed, it was of greater significance to him than the field site itself, as his only recorded observations about the Giant's Causeway were related to how well Sandys's prospect had reflected the reality. Cole's and Sandys's drawings are undervalued by modern historians of geology and their brave and groundbreaking attempts meaningfully to picture a philosophical landscape have been poorly treated or ignored.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ Given the early period in which these drawings were produced, the lack of a stylistic tradition for such landscapes and the importance accorded to them by contemporary philosophers this is surprising.

In order to publicize his new knowledge of the Giant's Causeway, Samuel Molyneux needed to pass through another set of places. Whether or not he in fact did so cannot be ascertained, although since he was actively trying to re-establish the Dublin Philosophical Society (moribund since 1697) it seems likely that he gave the few philosophers he had rallied to its standard some account of his trip to the north. While he left a manuscript record of his journey this was not published until 1896. He never wrote his proposed natural history of Ireland.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ His visit marks the end of an era, bringing to a close this story of the historical geography of the first years of the Giant's Causeway as a subject of the ‘scientific’ gaze. It would be over thirty years before new studies of the Giant's Causeway were published.

Knowledge of the Giant's Causeway in the late seventeenth century was an activity distributed across different sites. To begin with, there was the landscape of the Giant's Causeway, constituted as space of natural philosophy by virtue of the intriguing regularity of its stones. However, the Giant's Causeway was not a simple Euclidean space, but a place constituted in multiple venues and through various social practices. There was a marked disjunction between the field site and the sites of knowledge production. Understanding of the Giant's Causeway was developed in places remote from it. Through proxies such as pictures and specimens, even observations could be made at a distance from the field. The field was necessary as the source of the data, but more important spaces in the late seventeenth century for developing conceptual knowledge about the Giant's Causeway were the centres of accumulation. The geographical distance between the field and the philosopher was overcome by mobilizing the field through proxies, eyewitness reports, drawings and specimens, which provided the possibility of reproducing and understanding it in other places. This raised issues of trust, so the data sources had to be credible. When these proxies for the Giant's Causeway were combined with others containing information relating to different sites in a centre of accumulation, Thomas Molyneux's field of vision was extended to encompass other places and similar formations. By virtue of the epistemic space that he occupied, he was enabled to classify the rock of the Giant's Causeway as Lapis Basaltes. Looking upon the field site from the Dublin Philosophical Society, he could see new things that could not be seen by fieldworkers. Nevertheless, by 1698 Thomas Molyneux had doubts about the accuracy of the various proxies for the Giant's Causeway and about the epistemic validity of relying on second-hand data rather than making personal observations.

As natural philosophers sought a ‘true prospect’ of the Giant's Causeway in the seventeenth century, many intellectual spaces had to be traversed. These spaces, linked by personal contact, letters and publications, drawings and specimens, concepts of trust and social status, were not neutral containers for natural philosophy but had an important epistemic role in the development of understanding about the Giant's Causeway. Even at this early period, the field site was already problematized as a self-contained area of study. As a place of philosophical interest the Giant's Causeway, like any field, was constituted in other venues by a variety of embodied spatial practices, and became part of a network of cross-cutting locals and locales in which natural knowledge was sought.