A Parisian view of the old Causeway Tram

THE National Trust is about to start work on its ambitious plans for a spectacular new Visitors Centre at the Giant’s Causeway and when complete it will give a great boost to the World Heritage Site.

No doubt it will incorporate some kind of display featuring the old Causeway tram, which at one time linked Portrush and Bushmills with the Causeway.

The tramway was opened in 1883 and by the time it was axed in 1949 it had carried many thousands of passengers to and from the famous landmark.

Although much has been written about the tram, there are not too many first hand accounts of what it was like to travel in that quaint old mode of transport as a passenger.

It seems that not too many passengers were inclined to write about the experience but in the 1920s a visitor from France did just that and what he wrote was published in “L’Illustration,” a Paris newspaper.

Later the article was translated into English and found its way to Press outlets in Ireland.

The unnamed author set the experience in context like this: “There are in Ireland two or three pleasure trips so altogether beyond comparison that it would be a matter of regret if one were to die without having made them.”

He made no mention as to what he thought the other two pleasure trips were but went on to describe the journey he made on a day in March, 1924 along the spectacular coastal route from Portrush to the Giant’s Causeway.

“The traveller is agreeably surprised,” he wrote, “to find a charming hotel - admirable, indeed, a veritable bijou of elegance and convenience - with the greater surprise, if possible, of seeing there the only electric railway at present running on our planet.”

Readers of “L’Illustration” must have been green with envy but in this writer’s view they only had themselves to blame: “French tourists do not go often enough to Ireland, because the French are very well liked there, and the sons of green Erin do not forget that they are Celts like ourselves.”

The electric tram, he continued, “runs up, following the sea coast, an incline of three or four hundred metres, extending over a length of five miles, to Bushmills, where the electric generators are placed, worked by a waterfall.

“Nothing can be more surprising and amusing than this trip in open carriages. The train mounts briskly along the electric conductors in the midst of a running fire of sabots de fer. Accordingly as it rises the view extends over the blue sea to the distant mountains of Scotland, separated at this point from Ireland by a strait of 25 kilometres, at the same time as there defiles before you along the coast the most astonishing series of basaltic formations.”

From the tram he describes the dramatic view of the ancient ruins of Dunluce Castle and after a brief reference to the geology of the plain of Antrim, writes: “Occasionally, as at Dunluce, there is added to the natural phantasmagoria of the tableau, the tragic poetry of a feudal ruin which has been an illustrious fortress and the walls of which, literally hanging over the abyss, are attached to the earth by an arch en dos d’ane scarcely half a metre in size.

“Beneath the cliffs which support these old walls, black as itself, the sea has hollowed out caves which resound night and day with its roaring.”

The writer concludes with this powerful image of the Causeway: “Neither the Alps nor the chain of the Andes, nor Vesuvius, nor Etna, gives such an impression of grandeur and intimate communion with Nature.

“What is altogether surprising in these basaltic formations is that they are colossal, the result of cosmic forces, and at the same time quasi-Greek in quality and symmetry of arrangement. It seems that at one time volcanoes worked according to the canons of art. It is at once human – and superhuman – a very Causeway of Giants.”

Perhaps it would be unfair not to mention that visitors today are still able to experience a little bit of the old magic of a railway trip to the Causeway, courtesy of the mini-rail link established some years ago and which runs to and from Bushmills.

It’s a far cry, of course, from a trip in one of the original trams – one of them is preserved in the Ulster Folk and Transport Museum - but it is nevertheless worth trying if only to get a feel of what it must have been like in the old days.