PROVINCE OF ULSTER: The Giant's Causeway, Co. Antrim, is a strange basalt structure formed by the cooling of molten lava approximately 60 million years ago. A scattered necklace of thousands of drumlins - small hills of boulder clay, dumped as the last great ice age melted 13,000 years ago, separate the nine counties of the old province of Ulster - Armagh, Antrim, Cavan, Derry, Donegal, Down, Fermanagh, Monaghan and Tyrone - from the rest of the island of Ireland. A natural barrier, it runs in a swathe some 30 miles (48 km) wide from the placid Irish Sea in the east to the great Atlantic rollers of the west. Great man-made earthworks, thrown up in the 1st century B.C., span the gaps between drumlins. A third barrier, an international border, splits off six of the counties (Antrim, Armagh, Derry/Londonderry, Down, Fermanagh and Tyrone) to make Northern Ireland which comprises one-sixth of the island and is home to 1.5 million people. There have been people in Ulster since the Middle Stone Age, over 8000 years ago. They speared salmon, trapped boar and made camp in Ireland's first recorded human settlement - a collection of round huts of woven sapling and deer hide - at Mount Sandel on the banks of the River Bann in Co. Antrim. The history of this culture, gathered together as the "Ulster Cycle," the oldest vernacular epic in western European literature, is a heady mix of men, women and gods, battles and lusts, spells and sorrows. The land bridge which once joined Ireland to Britain disappeared around 6000 B. C., and it was not until the 4th millennium B. C. that the next wave of settlers came in the form of Neolithic, New Stone Age farmers who risked the Irish Sea in frail boats of lathe and hide, packed with pigs, cows and sheep, and made landfall among stands of elm, always a sign of good soil, in Strangford Lough. These new immigrants felled the forests, grew cereals, fired pots, built a distinctively northern style of stone cairn to their gods and buried their dead under the dolmens which stand eternal in many an Ulster field. By 2000 B.C., in the Bronze Age, contemporary with pyramids of Egypt's Middle Kingdom and the great Minoan palaces of Knossos on Crete, Ulster's tribes toiled to create the great stone circles of Down and Tyrone, while merchant adventurers taught them to make bronze axeheads and golden ornaments. By the coming of the Iron Age, the first Celts had arrived, conquering say some, assimilating say others, those more ancient peoples, the dark-skinned Fir Bolg, the red-haired Tuatha de Dannan, and the Cruithin of Ulster with their warrior-clan structure and their Red Branch Knights. These Gaels welcomed Patrick's Christian mission in the 5th century A. D. and resisted the subsequent Viking raids on their monasteries in the 8th century. -- Excerpt, "Irish Counties, J. J. Lee