Cover for Hardback Edition The Hidden Landscape – A Journey into the Geological Past
Geology and landscape are stalwart companions for the Scientific Tourist, and are intimately, inextricably related. Their beauty and mystery appeal to the scientist as much as to the tourist, but it is only the Scientific Tourist who can appreciate their fascinating interconnectedness.
This book explores the hidden landscape of the underlying geology and its all-important influence on the landscape that we can see, human and otherwise. This geology is also a landscape hidden in geological time. Hidden by the complex history of the formations themselves as they rose and fell, crashed into and over one another, and oceans and mountain ranges came, went and came again; this is a another landscape stretching back over billions of years, waiting to be explored.
Fortey takes us on a Scientific Tour of the UK, following age rather than the geography that the geology does so much to determine. Nevertheless, as age corresponds to broad swathes of landscape, we can read about any locality in which we find ourselves; from the Weald in Sussex through the great Chalk, over the Jurassic, Triassic and Cretaceous coasts, and on to the granite outcrops of the west or north. As he proceeds, he shows how the underlying geology shaped the landscape, its flora and fauna, and its people and their lives. Fortey also tells the fascinating story of how the geologists came to understand and explain that geology and its history. His enthusiasm is evident and contagious.
Appreciation of the Golden Age of Geology (approximately from the end of the 18th century to the latter half of the 19th) is easily combined with Scientific Tourism, especially in Britain and Europe, because there is such a wealth of accessible written material from the time. Geology seems to have been taken up by almost all the scientifically curious, with a similar enthusiasm to that for space exploration today. Geology became a pioneering (and influential) exploration of the natural world.
For instance, when Michael Faraday set off for a European Scientific Tour with Sir Humphrey Davy in 1813, he had never before left London, and it was the landscape which excited him.
“Friday, October 15th.—……… I was more taken by the scenery to-day than by anything else I have ever seen. It came upon me unexpectedly, and caused a kind of revolution in my ideas respecting the nature of the earth’s surface. […..] the mountainous nature of the country [Devonshire!] continually put forward new forms and objects, and the landscape changed before the eye more rapidly than the organ could observe it. This day gave me some idea of the pleasures of travelling, and has raised my expectations of future enjoyment to a very high point.”
Faraday lived in an age of ‘geologising,’ when people travelled not just for the joy of seeing new landscapes, but with the intention to understand them and how they came to be. For the first time, geology became the reason for travel, not just a by-product. Where geographers had recorded matters related to geology (minerals, mountains and seas), the geologists travelled to explore the landscape and, most importantly, understand its history. This drive to understand the earth we live on gave new paradigms for other sciences, most importantly perhaps, biology and evolution; the search to understand where we came from. This appreciation of the rapidly growing science, showing the mutability of the very earth itself, surely freed the mind to speculate about what else might be questioned.
Just as Copernicus and Galileo revised man’s place in the physical universe, no longer at the centre of creation, so geologic time reduced man’s prominence in history. Now that the earth was not created in its present state, but had changed and changed again over untold time, so life, and even humans, could have mutated and evolved in such aeons. This way of thinking was a major influence on Faraday’s near contemporary, Charles Darwin, as is clear from Darwin’s account of his own Scientific Tourism aboard HMS Beagle. See Review of ‘The Voyage of the Beagle’
The UK was a powerhouse for this new science of geology. So much so that even today the geological ages are still known by the names given by the Victorian geologists, and these names often refer to places in the UK, the Cambrian and Devonian for instance. Little Wales gave its name to a period of 54 million years, one of the most significant periods in palaeontology and the evolution of wonderful life.
And that leads to another attraction of the UK for the Scientific Tourist; the UK has a lot of geology. Paralleling its human history, the UK is crowded with elements from opposite ends of the earth and geologic time, all jumbled up together in a fairly small space. Its oldest rocks go back nearly 3 billion years and you can find evidence and examples of just about every period from then until today. The stories of the unravelling of that complex history, still not complete, are fascinating, and Fortey brings them to life in the very locations themselves.
So it is here in the UK that the Scientific Tourist can not only explore varied and fascinating geology, but also visit the sites and formations which inspired the foundations of the science itself. You can see Cambrian rocks in the very place from which they take their name. And Fortey is a knowledgable and amusing guide, able to draw clear relations between landscape and geology. And that’s helpful, because practical geology can be confusing – lists of beds and formations, not to mention the bewildering variety of technical terminology can daunt the unschooled.
The book could do with a few more diagrammatic illustrations, in my opinion, if some of the descriptive text is to be more than a list of names and rock formations. Fortey lists the British Geographical Survey maps for some reason, but simpler, more schematic illustrations, especially maps, would be helpful to those unfamiliar with the geology, or indeed, the geography of the UK. Geology is profoundly spatial and it’s helpful to see the lay of the land. Just as it helps me to keep a chart of the geological ages in front of me, so I can remember how far apart the Miocene and the Devonian are. Fortunately one of these is provided. However, the pictorial illustrations of everything from mountain ranges to cottages, are interesting and relevant. I’d recommend being beside a computer when reading this book, just for the vast amount of wonderful pictorial information available on the web.
Geological Diagram Of Weald Anticline, Home Of Your Scientific Tourist (Image From Wikipedia)
Another resource for anyone following the book ‘on the ground’, as it were, could do worse than look up the relevant local geological societies, of which there are a surprising number with many enthusiastic and friendly members.
Sometimes a strained or a slightly contrived metaphor or simile, and the occasional old-fashioned phrase (who refers to plum duff these days?) appears in the well written prose, but they are not intrusive. In fact they are welcome, anyone familiar with Professor Fortey from his excellent television programmes (see Richard_Fortey for details) will hear his authentic voice in the narrative. Fortey has been geologising for a long time and learnt his trade on the very rocks he describes here, lending a pleasantly personal aspect to the narrative.
So I can happily recommend ‘The Hidden Landscape – A Journey into the Geological Past’ to any Scientific Tourist. Even if you can’t visit all or even most of the locations mentioned, it is still a very worthwhile read, but it’s even better as a companion for almost any trip in the UK.