Scientists have used water, corn starch and heat to crack the centuries-old riddle of how the mysterious Giant’s Causeway was formed.

The uncannily well-ordered 40,000 hexagonal columns off the coast of Antrim are one of the island’s top tourist attractions, with legend having it that Fionn McCool built the Causeway with his own hands.

But in more recent times geologists discovered that it was formed by molten lava which left behind a permanent pattern of six-sided stacks when it cooled in the water.

But the mystery of why it formed columns of stone remained unsolved until a physics professor Stephen Morris of Toronto University took an interest.

Prof Morris concluded: “The columns are formed by the same process in corn starch as in lava. We identified the special ratio of speed, column size and diffusion that is the same in all cases. We found that the slower the cooling process, the larger the resulting columns would be.”