I came to see that what lies beneath our boots, the rocky bones of Britain, has shaped everything I love about the country.
A bright spring morning in the Isle of Lewis, outermost corner of the Western Isles. On the pristine sands of Tolsta Bay I contemplated a riot of strikingly coloured cliffs and sea-stacks of ancient rock known as gneiss, as naked and contorted as when they first formed in the nascent earth’s crust 3,000 million years ago. This was the first step of a journey by foot and ferry across the geological history of Britain, all the way from these most ancient rocks to the youngest, a thousand miles away on the muddy Essex shore.
I used to think of geology as baffling and boring, a stew of technical terms about a pile of dusty old rocks. But after forty years of exploring every corner of these islands on foot, I came to see that what lies beneath our boots, the rocky bones of Britain, has shaped everything I love about the country – its wonderful shapes and colours, its curves and hollows, the dramatic cliffs and subtle lowlands, the way we build and farm and make our livings, our ongoing story through smooth and troubled times. I made up my mind to string together a line of paths that I could walk from end to end of the country, learning our geological story as I went along.