and his two brothers were brought up in Edinburgh, in the Midland Valley of Scotland, moving with the family for a few years to Peebles in the Southern Uplands, during part of the Second World War. Many of the family activities involved visits to the countryside, and the pleasures and interests of these visits have continued into new generations of the family. The other two authors of this book have recently moved from southern England, where the book has been written, and now enjoy the landscapes of northern Scotland where they live and work.
Landscapes are easy to look at, given reasonable weather conditions, but difficult to describe in words. But developments in computer technology now offer many ways of analysing landscapes using different mapping methods, and these, along with diagrams and photos, form the framework of this book. Working on this imagery has been the main contribution of a succession of enthusiastic helpers. Lucinda Edes, Emilie Galley and Liesbeth Renders, and the second and third authors of this book, have all contributed great skill and enthusiastic innovation to this work, and made the project enjoyable as well as successful.
The home of this project has been the Department of Earth Sciences in the University of Cambridge. Peter Friend walked into the department as a first-year student some 57 years ago, to meet his supervisor, W. Brian Harland, for the first time. Apart from a period in the Scott Polar Research Institute, he has been based in Cambridge Department of Earth Sciences ever since, teaching and exploring the scenery and geology of many parts of the world. This work has included many visits to Spitsbergen (under the guidance of W. Brian Harland), Greenland, Spain, the Arabian Gulf, India and Pakistan. This has been an exciting period to be working in geology in Cambridge, because many key advances in the subject have been made by people working in Cambridge. CASP, originally the Cambridge Arctic Shelf Programme, made a valuable donation in support of the aerial photography used in this book.
All three authors would like to acknowledge their debts to the Cambridge college system. In the case of Peter Friend, his college, Darwin, has provided him with the congenial friendship of many people from diverse backgrounds, and their skills have helped him to remain a generalist in his interests.
Any work of this sort on the British Isles owes a fundamental debt to the British Geological Survey (BGS), now based at Keyworth near Nottingham. The numerous Survey maps and reports provide a remarkable source of carefully observed and objective information. The BGS has readily provided advice and help for this project, and helped to determine the sort of coverage and level that would be best.
The photographs that form such an important part of this book have come from many sources, and we are grateful to the following organisations and individuals for allowing us to use the results of their work (individually credited in the figure captions): Aerographica (Patricia and Angus Macdonald), Nicholas Branson, British Geological Survey, Lorne Gill, Last Refuge Limited (the late Adrian Warren, and Dae Sasitorn), David Law, Planetary Visions/Science Photo Library, Scottish Natural Heritage, Nigel Trewin.
Many other people have made important contributions by providing ideas and materials. These include John R. L. Allen, Wendy Annan, Phillip Gibbard, Alan Smith, Nigel Trewin, Nigel Woodcock and Richard West.
As with the New Naturalist volume on Southern England, this volume is dedicated to the Dr John C. Taylor Foundation, which has provided the financial support essential for the production of the imagery that is such a key part of the book’s presentation. Some 50 years ago, John spent two summers exploring the geology of Spitsbergen with Peter Friend, and the support of his foundation has made both books possible.
We wish to thank HarperCollins Publishers for their support of the New Naturalist series, and particularly Myles Archibald, and then Julia Koppitz, for enthusiasm and help throughout. Hugh Brazier, Martin Brown and Robert Gillmor have brought great talents to different aspects of preparing this book.
The cover shows a view at Siccar Point, Berwickshire (Area 5). When James Hutton and some friends visited in 1788, they recognised what is now known to be an unusally good example of an unconformity. They made geological history by seeing it as evidence of the folding, erosion and deposition of strata over an incredibly long series of episodes in the Earth’s past history (see also picture).
CHAPTER 1
Looking at Scotland’s Landscapes
LANDSCAPES AND LANDFORMS
FIGURE 1 IS A SCOTTISH VIEW, showing landscapes that are typical of the confections of topographic shapes, sea, light, colour and atmosphere that are enjoyed by all. The object of this book is to contribute further to that enjoyment by surveying the varied landscapes of Scotland, and to help the reader to discover the stories that lie behind the rich variety.
At least two landscapes are present in this photograph: (1) in the middle distance, terraced hills in autumn gold vegetation extend down to the shores of Loch Slapin in the foreground, about 2 km in coastal length, and (2) behind this landscape rises the dark mass of the Cuillin mountains, providing one of the most famous and distinctive of Scottish landscapes, covering an area some 10 km across and giving a skyline to this photograph that is about 15 km from the photographer.
Many enthusiasts have written about the scenery of specific parts of Scotland. In this book the aim has been to cover the whole country relatively uniformly, because the variations from place to place are interesting in themselves. But this uniformity of approach has made it necessary to adopt a rather broad-brush treatment, whilst establishing the linear scale of features by the use of maps and aerial photographs in which the scale is clear in general terms. It is useful to follow earlier authors who regarded a landscape as an area of land that can be seen from one vantage point. In the case of Figure 1, the oblique aerial view covers two landscapes that are kilometres to tens of kilometres across.
Figure 1 provides a fine example of Scottish scenery that not only allows some questions of scale to be considered, but also illustrates the sorts of features that can be used to investigate the stories behind landscapes. Numerous small cliffs and bays of the coastal cliffs are visible in the foreground, where resistant bedrock provides information about the early history of events in this landscape area. The Cuillin mountains themselves are very special in the amount of bedrock that is visible in their slopes, and in the roughness that this bedrock has given to the peaks and ridges. As we shall see, the bedrock history of the Cuillin provides an explanation of the size and surface style of these remarkable hills. In the middle distance, various smaller landscape features, landforms, are visible, particularly some clearly developed terraces and cliffs. There are also smaller ridges, cross-cutting the terraces and cliffs, and often occupied by small stream valleys. These landforms directly reflect erosion of different features of the bedrock. The middle distance also illustrates the way that the gentler slopes tend to have a covering of surface blanket, often made of peat, soil or relatively weak and young sediment.
FIG 1. Aerial oblique photograph looking northwestwards towards the Cuillin mountains, Skye. (© Patricia & Angus Macdonald/Aerographica)
PEOPLE
Much has been written about landscape history, and by many people the phrase tends to have been used for the way that mankind has modified landscapes. This approach is not the main focus of this book, which deliberately concentrates on natural landscape features. However, all the landscapes described contain roads and settlements. In some cases, such as in Figure 1, these are visible but
