Discover where geology turns the world on its head
GEORGE ANDERSON AND HEATHER KINNIN
If you park at the end of the track, go round the back of a turnip shed and scramble down a steep bank, you can still see the conflicting layers of rock which gave Hutton the idea that the world wasn't created in six days
SCOTLAND is awash with obvious tourist sites and nature reserves, but there is a particular thrill in finding the lesser-known hidden gems.
Fancy a trip to Hell and back, via Purgatory and Paradise? Well you have to go to the Orkney Islands. Or how about discovering a cliff face that turned the understanding of Earths history upside down?
Tucked away in anonymity behind a turnip shed on the Berwickshire coast of ****burnspath is Siccar Point, a rugged patch of cliffs high atop a beach looking onto the North Sea. Although quite out of the way, it is without exaggeration a destination for scientists seeking a first-hand glimpse into the very basis of all modern geology.
They visit Siccar Point to pay homage from all over, says Dr Colin MacFadyen of Scottish Natural Heritage.
In 1998 a giant rubber cast of the cliff at Siccar Point was taken so that the formation could be recreated in exact detail at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City
It was there, in 1788, that James Hutton and two friends visited the rocky coastline by boat. Hutton - a doctor, scientist and farmer - saw the way the rocks were laid one on top of the other. He later described the relationship as an "unconformity" caused by the tilting of older rocks by Earth movements before later rocks were laid down in flat sheets on top. What he saw was the tilted, eroded base of Silurian sandstone and shale from 425 million years ago with level Old Red Sandstone from the Devonian period 345 million years ago on top.
"Hutton could see deep into time. He was claiming that Earths mountains are recycled over hundreds of millions of years," says MacFadyen. "We are fortunate to have a tremendous geo-density here and that Hutton took an interest in the subject."
Hutton did not know just how old these rocks were but he was convinced that the Earth must be "immeasurably old" and that natural processes, such as erosion and the build up of strata on the sea floor, operated in the past as natural processes did in his day. He made the memorable observation that "we find no vestige of a beginning, no prospect of an end" to geological time. The popular view that the Earth was formed about 4000 BC and in six days could not be true.
From the east of Scotland to the western reaches we go to visit one of mother natures more unusual sights.
On the west coast of Lewis, long white beaches and multi-coloured seas are broken up by sheer cliffs and rocky outcrops. Inland, heather-coloured moors stretch into the distant, low-lying boggy land sliced through by lochans and streams.
A woman and her child are dwarfed by the massive hole on Lewis that sits between them and the photographer
These two different landscapes come together in a startling marriage close to the village of Islivig. Here, a long moorland walk accompanied by the distant rumble of the Atlantic is suddenly and dramatically transformed by a large gaping hole. A near-by sign warns of the danger, and the sheep corpses that have tumbled into the gap are testimony to the precipitous edge.
Here is the Uig blowhole. On fair days a gaping crater drops down in the middle of the moor. During rough weather, though, the sea charges in from the sea underground to spout up angrily, gushing like a geyser. With no signposts it is a little known natural phenomena marked only on the most detailed of maps.
It is well worth a visit, for the simple pleasure of finding the unknown in middle of a mud-coloured moor.
If its far and the far-fetched that you are after, then a trip to Hell might put the fire in your belly.
Theory of the Earth, by James Hutton, 1795 The Hogboon of Hell and Other Strange Orkney Tales, by Nancy and W. Towie Cutt, 1979
-- Edited by Rabbie Downunder at 04:34, 2007-06-05
About 7 weeks later, have just found your Geology contribution [Hutton & Towie Cutt] First photo reminds me of King's Canyon in Northern Territory, one of the strangest and most uncanny places i have ever walked, you feel on top of the world and there is just one red striated turret after another,only stunted bushes in rare pockets of earth, until you come to the canyon, where some kind authority has built staircases down into rain forest. Aussied Pom,
This is an extremely interesting article . . . especially in that only four miles from my home, on a relatively new highway, there is just such a phenomenon that is constantly visited and studied by students, not only of The University of Tennessee Department of Archaeology, but from Universities throughout the region. They can pull their vans right up even with the site and take pictures and samples, etc. It is interesting to watch them get excited over it.
Incidentally . . . this posting shows at least one way that pictures (with subtitles and explanations) can be posted on this site. Sure it takes a little effort to write a narrative . . . but, what the heck, if it's worth doing, it's worth doing well.
