8Kennedy, Alasdair. "In Search of the 'True Prospect': Making and Knowing the Giant's Causeway as a Field Site in the Seventeenth Century." British Society for the History of Science 10.10 (2007): 21-22.
An earlier article with the same subject was published in 1896: "No mention is made of this marvellous work of Nature in the Four Masters, the Chironicon Scotorum, or the Annals of Ulster, nor does any medieval author apparently allude to it, although other objects of curiosity in Ulster are described...The learned antiquaries of a later date—Camden, Boate, and Ware—alike seemed ignorant of its existence. Equally do the geographical map makers—Mercator (1594), Speed (1610), and others, down to the I8th century—omit it in their various publications…So late as 1727, when Les Délices la Grande Bretagne et de l’Irlande was published in 8 vols. at Leydern, no mention occurs of its existence. A more remarkable circumstance, however, is its omission by Richard Dobbs in his description of the natural features of the County Antrim, which he wrote for Pitt's Atlas in I683. This was printed for the first time in extenso in the Rev. George Hill's Macdonnells of Antrim. Dobbs mentions Dunluce, Bushmills, and Ballycastle, and was particularly fond of natural history and mineralogy. It may be possible that he had intended to add an account of the Giant's Causeway to his other notices of County Antrim, but certainly he has not done so. This strange omission of any mention of such a remarkable natural phenomenon is the more curious, when we consider how very fond our ancestors were of tabulating natural wonders, and how many pages in old books are filled with descriptions of trivial objects of interest." "Early Notices and Engraved Views of the Giant's Causeway." Ulster Journal of Archaeology Second 3.1 (1896): 41-42.