Where Time Runs Deep

From Glen Coe to the Moine Thrust, billion-year stories are etched into the bedrock of the Scottish Highlands

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GEOLOGY and I were never great bedfellows. I know the subject is the science of the physical processes that created Earth's landscapes, but it always seemed over-complicated to my simple mind. I could never get my brain into sync with concepts that involved billions and billions of years.

I simply couldn't comprehend such vast timescales.

It didn't help that school lessons were overloaded with names and phrases that had little meaning to me: tectonic plates, metamorphic rock, geochemical transitions, volcanic magma. It was as though the subject was designed to confuse and obfuscate.

Geology is an extremely complex subject, and that complexity can be an attraction to information-seeking intellects, but it took me a long time to equate this Earth science with the idea of going for a walk in the mountains.

The first seeds of interest were first sewn in my early 20s, when I sat on a mountain top in Glen Coe with a fellow climber who was a few years older than me.

During our climbs I'd learned the differences between schist and quartzite, andesite and granite, and as we shared tea and some sandwiches between climbs, I was mesmerised as my companion explained to me that the rock I was sitting on was part of an ancient volcano that erupted through and onto a land surface of Dalradian metamorphic rocks about 420 million years before.

It made me think seriously about the origin of Scottish hills. I still didn't fully understand it, but I was learning that if our hills and mountains had required one thing above all else it was time - and lots of it.