Day 411: The Entire North Coast in Two Glasses

Tags

Bertand Russell, Bettyhill, Caithness, Farr Bay, first record player, Sutherland, Thurso, whisky

A Journey into Scotland : Part 51

Usquebaugh

I’d passed through Tongue with the speed of a proper cyclist and the stamina of one in serious training. I’d even turned down the opportunity to sink a glass or two with another who had pedalled a long way to be here. It was the first day of my entire ride when I was trying to hurry along. The end result was inevitable. I was getting to the point where I could cycle all day at ten miles an hour. This included getting off to push the laden beast up steeper hills and stopping to brew tea on any vantage point it seemed a pity to miss. Whenever I found myself in company with another pedaller I found they wanted to go along at twelve miles an hour and this was outside my ability.  I’d need a new training regime, to lose a bag or two or to invest in a new bicycle. One with an engine on it.

At twelve o’clock I felt fine. By two I was gone. My hopes of reaching my goal before sundown were blown away on the south-westerly. Thurso had managed without me for 23 years. It was going to have to manage an extra day. I dropped down into a place that had those glimmers of memory. We had been taken, as children, to an hotel at Bettyhill. Our parents had been treated royally while we children were entertained as though we were the most special in the world. A waitress was given over entirely to us and kept us happy with games of hunt the thimble and musical chairs before showing off the piéce de résistance. The first record player I had ever seen and the first records. I have no recollection what records they were. It doesn’t matter. The lady put the magical black discs on the spindle and the music poured out. A lifelong love of listening to recorded music was born there and then. Not happy with merely changing entire outlooks, she wanted to show that the record player could start itself. The 7 inch single was positioned at the top of the spindle and some switches pressed or tweaked and the plastic disc dropped onto the turntable and the arm swung across.

I can almost hear the background hiss and the tump as the stylus touched the record. She still had one trick up her sleeve. The loading of five records onto the spindle at once and watching them drop, one at a time, as each finished its song. By the time the fifth record was playing the drag was considerable but the delight of four young children was undiminished.

We begged to go back and we did. For my brother’s fifth birthday.  (That would make me three and a quarter.) The same lady looked after us and I have yet to go to a party that I enjoyed more. Without the aid of photographs I can still see the cake being brought in with the candles blazing. It was a magical occasion at the time and the magic has probably grown a little in the memory of intervening years. It isn’t difficult to find the Bettyhill Hotel and I’ve already decided that I want a glass of lemonade and a slice of sponge cake to try to re-live a special moment from early 1961. The hotel is closed.

I don’t know if it was the disappointment or the onset of tiredness but my legs had lost all interest in turning pedals. The smallest and slightest uphill stretches were a slog and downhill merely prefaced another uphill pull. The urge to get to Thurso was strong but the day was dimming early and an open bar at the Farr Bay Hotel drew me in. A roaring fire and a friendly welcome from a mildly eccentric elderly man with a Bertrand Russell shock of white hair made me want to stay. I began with a pot of tea and took the table nearest to the fire and listened while my landlord regaled me with information he felt any visitor to the north coast should have. He had an infectious enthusiasm and a way of holding you with a stare that punctuated his monologue, mid-sentence, and held you with a raised bushy eyebrow. There was more than a touch of Private Frazer (as played by the brilliant John Laurie) from Dad’s Army about the man. I couldn’t be entirely sure if he was genuinely pleased to see me or if he was shamelessly sending me up. He showed great interest in my Thurso childhood and expressed glowing admiration for my long journey up the west coast to get here. He had a way of making me wonder if I was making the right decisions by popping in the question “Are you sure?” or “If you really think so?” or “If you’re quite sure?” It was really quite unsettling.

I’d spent the last week sleeping in a tent on moors and lonely foreshores interspersed with youth hostels with cold water and shared dormitories. Now I’d finally got to the gates of my destination I decided to treat myself to a night in a comfortable room. “Well, if you are really sure?” he questioned as he showed me a room out of the ideal home exhibition, perfect cottage bedroom range. Floral wallpaper and watercolours in frames. A big fat comfortable double bed and a wash set of bowl and ewer on the washstand.

“The bathroom is just down the corridor. There’s plenty of hot water if you want a bath. That is if you’re really sure you want to stay here?”

I did. I bathed, I changed and I walked out and followed the path that brought me to the unexpectedly perfect beach of Farr Bar itself. I was the only person there and I followed the curve of the narrow bay as far as the incoming tide would allow a person who is respectful of such things. The last of the evening light was fading as I re-entered the bar. By now it was well patronised by a handful of locals, some more late season tourists and four engineers who were staying there while erecting poles to carry electricity to parts of the north that didn’t yet receive it. They accepted me into their circle, bought me a pint of heavy and shared stories of how we came to be in that bar. Three were from Aberdeen and one was English. After a couple of beers they went off for a prearranged meal and I was left with the landlord as my sole interlocutor.

As with most old pubs in the north it had the most fabulous array of whiskies behind the bar. I didn’t drink whisky myself but couldn’t help be impressed with the range of bottles. Some were ancient, some modern. A few I had heard of, many that I couldn’t even begin to pronounce. I’d occasionally wished I liked whisky. There seemed something very wise and grown up and peaceful about taking a “wee dram”.

The landlord caught my stare and put my thoughts into words. “Now, correct me if I’m wrong, but, you look like the sort of man who doesn’t often drink whisky but are wondering whether you shouldn’t make some kind of an exception this night.”

I admitted that he’d read my thoughts pretty well but added that I was a little afraid of my capacity to drink it.

“Och, don’t worry. I’ll pour you a glass of the gentlest of all the whiskies. This one (he said taking a particularly ancient bottle from the second shelf) is the only single malt whisky distilled in the county of Sutherland. Sip it slowly. It’ll melt your tastebuds.” He paused with the tip of the bottle touching the lip of the glass, looked at me with his cocked bushy eye-brow and added “That is, if you really think you should?”

He poured without a measure and the measure he poured more than doubled the quantity of whisky I had drunk in my life up to that point. He taught me that the pint is the chaser and the two drinks lasted me a pleasant 45 minutes or more. The bar filled up. Conversation flowed and the fire and whisky filled me with a warmth I hadn’t felt on that journey. When he saw my glass was empty he pulled down an even older bottle and said. “How about a wee drop of this. It’s the only single malt whisky distilled in the county of Caithness. By the time you’ve finished that one, you’ll have done the entire north coast in two glasses.”

The second measure was more generous than the first. I sipped slowly. I never got over the heat and strength of the drink. Always felt a ridiculous novice and had the sense to pass on storytelling and to become an auditor.

That night I slept well until, waking, I felt drunker than I had ever felt before. I also had an urgent need to use the bathroom, which was down the landing. On returning to my bedroom I found myself drunk and alone at the top of a strange staircase with five doors to choose from. One of them was my cosy bedroom. The other four weren’t.

Day 409: When You Get to the Sea, Turn Right

Tags

Barrow in Furness, Caithness, Cycle tour of Scotland, Durness, Loch Eriboll, Smoo Cave, Sutherland, Tongue

A Journey into Scotland: Part 49

I Can’t Remember My Earliest Memory

It was 1987 and September had become October. You could almost add a month on top of that for how far north I’d pedalled. Twelve of the fourteen newly qualified English teachers, I’d spent the last twelve months with, were banking their first pay cheques and contemplating that it might be all worth it after all. My life was in a crisis. I’d been either brilliant or incompetent on teaching practice and was finding it hard to sign on for a full career. It wasn’t the fear of failure. It was something greater than that. I’d only go into teaching if I thought I could do it better than most who had taught me. As a pupil I’d had a rough deal from the system. It just wasn’t set up for somebody like me and I wanted to make sure that those, of a curious, independent disposition, who followed weren’t let down too. I’d set off to cycle fifteen hundred miles to every place I had ever lived in the hope, that the re-tracing of my life, and the sheer exhaustive scope of the challenge, would clear my head. I had offers as work as an actor, a musician and a composer. I’d grown fond of the idea of marching to my own drum. On the other hand the country was in recession and we had two small children and no dependable source of income.

I’d set out from Barrow-in Furness and spent half a day revisiting eleven of my first fourteen years on the planet. The missing three years were four hundred and fifty crow flown miles to the north. It had taken me eleven days to hit the north coast. (If you weren’t following this in the spring, then you can catch up on as much or as little as you wish in “Journey into Scotland” on my home page.) It had been a hugely enjoyable adventure. I wasn’t feeling the absence of a classroom or a salary. I’d had a scare when a large silver coach from Surrey had knocked me spinning off the road. My initial fear was that I’d torn ligaments or badly sprained my ankle. The fact that I was gingerly riding my bike again within an hour and back on the grand tour within 48 suggested that I’d jarred and bruised it. It hurt but it did little other than slow me down for a few days. I set off earlier and arrived later but I kept to my schedule. (Barring an enforced day off experiencing the palm fringed delights of Plockton and Loch Carron.)

All the way up the west coast (and a few diversions inland) I’d marvelled at a simple magical fact about Scotland. No matter how glorious the scenery, the landscape and the air, the following day would beat it into a cocked hat. The Southern uplands of Dumfries and Galloway made me want to linger but were soon forgotten as I rode along the western shore of Loch Lomond. Rannoch Moor became Glencoe and I was sure I’d reached the peak of perfection. Nowhere, surely, could beat this. And then I rode the road to the Isles from Fort William to Mallaig.

Mallaig was one of a hundred towns and villages, I’d never heard of before, but which I’ve longed to return to ever since. Kilmacolm, Crianlarich, Achnasheen, Plockton, Dalry are all now part of who I was and that makes them a part of who I am.

The moment when I started quoting Shakespeare unprompted,

“Did my heart love till now? Forswear it, sight!
For I ne’er saw true beauty till this night”

arrives in Sutherland. Staggering rough hewn beauty in a landscape so vast it is difficult to conceive of in a country as small as ours. To be here was a feeling of jubilance; to have pedalled every yard under my own steam* was one of my greater achievements.

After 48 episodes, I quietly left this journal aside in June and wandered around England for a while. My 1987 self was left quietly on top of a Sutherland hill brewing tea and looking out over the Kyle of Durness and away towards Cape Wrath and the entire top left hand corner of these islands. I’d pedalled further in a day than I had at any point of my journey. My tweaked ankle made me walk with a John Wayne lurch but was happy to turn pedals for hours at a time. I was back inside the lands of living memories. I know the north coast in that pre-umbra of memory from earliest childhood. 

On teaching practice I had a class writing about their first recollections. Writing is the most wonderful of tools for exploring the mind and twenty five heads were bowed over their tables and twenty five pens were uncovering thoughts that they would later share with some pride. One boy wasn’t having this though. He was fearful of writing and saw it as just another of his inadequacies. Another way to fail. He sought reasons not to put pen to paper. He measured his success in lessons by the blankness of his sheet or the subversiveness of his doodles.

“I don’t know what to put.”

“Write about the first thing you can remember.”

“I can’t remember being born.”

“Neither can I. Just the first thing you can remember.”

“Like my earliest memory?”

“That’s right. Your earliest memory.”

“I can’t remember my earliest memory.”

And neither, young Robert, can I. I thought I could. I lived here on the north coast of Scotland between the ages of two and five so I’m pretty certain that my consciousness of who I am and what I’ve done dates back to here. That cold northern sea looked over the change from a thing that ate and slept and cried to one who read and walked and wandered off alone. Who sledged down an icy road and who skimmed stones on lochs and paddled in the surf.

I stayed the night in the youth hostel at Durness. Ironically I can remember very little of this other than a cold floor. In the morning a fellow cyclist and I made our way to Smoo Cave and tested the acoustics by singing into it. He was a fitter and faster pedaller than I was and set off over the hills saying he’d meet me again at Tongue. He was there outside a pub enjoying his second pint by the time I got there. It wasn’t quite mid-day.

Having spent a fortnight at a leisurely pace I was infused with a desire to get to where I knew best. I’d snapped a gear cable and was without the larger cog at the front. It didn’t make a great deal of difference as I turned back south to ride against a stiff breeze along the shores of Loch Eriboll. It was here that some of the greatest discoveries were made that unfolded the geological history of the planet. I had my head down into the wind and was attempting, for the first time on the journey, to ride quickly. The speedometer on the handlebars made a mockery of this. Many of the sea lochs have been bridged but the few hundred yards that a seagull flies to get from one shore to the other is the best part of twenty miles for the cyclist. The uplands between there and Tongue are amongst the most beautiful in Scotland. I confess to missing the opportunity to soak in that beauty. Like a cyclist on the Tour de France, I flew through the grandeur more aware of the desire to reach my destination than take in the views.

I didn’t join in the early lunchtime supping in Tongue but headed in my determined way towards the county boundary that would bring me back to where I once lived. I’d cycled hundreds of miles to reach the most magnificent part of Scotland and all I wanted to do was to get to the flatter, bleaker, boggier, windier lands to the east. I wanted to get to Caithness because that name had been on the very first home address I’d ever written out. The one that ends with Solar System, Galaxy, Universe. The world was huge. Those were the Orkneys out there to my left. I was going home.

 

*Give or take a couple of ferry rides.

 

Day 285: Over Bridge of Sighs

Tags

Cape Wrath, Cycle tour of Scotland, Durness, John Lennon, Kylesku Bridge, Lewisian gneiss, Scotland, Scourie, sitka spruce, Sutherland, Yoko Ono

A Journey into Scotland … Part 48

This road has taken some building. Transport communications this far north don’t come easy. Railway lines have to be floated on rafts of tree roots and heather across the vast moorlands. Roads here in the north west have to be blasted through tons of rock. The geology is revealed and anyone wishing to start a collection of rocks and minerals could fill their first shelf from the chippings from lay-bys.

At one time travel was slower. The great sea lochs add hundreds of miles to the Scottish coastline. At one time ferries or thirty mile detours were the only way across or round the tongues of water. This slowed the journey and caused bottlenecks even at quiet times of year. One of the worst bottlenecks was at Kylesku where a ferry transported cars and lorries across 150 yards of salt water.

In 1984 a bridge was opened that not only shortened the journey, but which brought a little piece of human beauty to the highlands. This is the sort of construction that gives concrete a good name. A deal of thought and one of the more respectable architectural firms (Arup) crossed Loch à Chairn Bhain with a bridge that  fits in with the landscape around. I’m so impressed that I forget my poor head for heights  (It isn’t a scary bridge) and stop in the middle to get a bird’s eye view. It doesn’t disappoint.

A short rise and fall on the other side brings you flush to the coast and views that send the spirits soaring once more. The massive bulk of Quinag stands with its three peaks in the shape of the milking pail that gave the mountain its Gaelic name. In England this would be a sight to see. Here it is just one more of those mountains that fail to meet the 3000 feet required to be a Munro. Each peak stands out differently. Even in the overcast swirl of a Scottish day in October, this mountain twinkles with different colours. Once you’ve collected your pile of stones from the Sutherland car parks, head up this bulk of a mountain and see for yourself the massive outcrops of Torridonian sandstones in their sedimentary layers, the Cambrian quartzites in their glittering array and the old as time Lewisian Gneiss that underlays the region.

Gorse and heather and boulders mark out the next few miles. Past lochans that make you feel like a swim but which would just about freeze the skin off you if you tried. Loch Creag an Eich looks no bigger than an ornamental lake with water lilies. My ankle is doing fine. I’ve got into the rhythm of the day and feel I could keep going til dusk. I have no plans for where I’m going to stop and as long as the weather holds and the world keeps looking as wild and rugged as this I don’t bother making any. The biggest hills are behind me. There are even long stretches of flat road which, with the wind behind my back, are as good as stopping for a rest.

The first trees for a while are Scot’s pine and they look just right in this wilderness. All too soon they change to Sitka spruce. There is little that is attractive about this tree other than its fast growing, straight trunks; and they only appeal to the sawmill.

Quinag and the Kylesku Bridge

At one time most of this land would have been a natural forest of scot’s pine and native species. I’d always thought that it was the action of people that had cleared away the trees. And certainly people have de-forested much of Scotland. The biggest cause of deforestation in Scotland though is climate change. Four thousand years ago it became colder and wetter. Scottish trees are well suited to surviving the cold, but the wet raised the water table and turned ground to bog. Trees are renowned as the lungs of the world. They seemingly create oxygen from carbon dioxide through that life giving process called photosynthesis. But trees need oxygen themselves. They take it up through their roots. But not when the ground becomes permanently water logged. Four thousand years ago most of Scotland’s trees literally drowned.

Huge efforts have been made in the last three hundred years to re-forest the hills and moors but these have been driven by market forces rather than with an eye to needs of the countryside. Eighteenth century planters saw a huge fortune waiting in supplying spruce for the British navy. Thousands of acres were planted. But even these fast growing trees didn’t grow fast enough. By the time they had reached maturity people like Brunel had shown the world how to build ships out of iron.

Throughout the twentieth century the Forestry Commission became obsessed with planting more and more Sitka spruce. Landowners, with some famous name pop stars among them, were given huge tax incentives to cover the world with this abomination of a tree. Even the positive and enthusiastic professor Iain Stewart described the plantations (they were not forests) as, “Square, dark, dingy, ugly, silent, unappealing, unattractive, lacking in wildlife… Frankenstein forests”.

Happily its time is passing. The felling of the last Sitka spruce should be declared a public holiday.

And then a first for me. Just past Loch Bad Nan Gad the main road, an official A road; one of the main arterial highways of the nation, narrows and crosses a cattle grid. These are common enough on farm roads or country lanes but to find one on a main route comes as something of a surprise. Beyond is untamed land where sheep and deer graze. The two look so peaceful and at home on the sides of the fell, yet the two are responsible for the lack of a human population up here. Thousands of families were forcibly removed because it made more money for the landowners to populate the north with a source of wool and an opportunity for the idle rich to come up once a year to maim stags in the name of sport.

At Scourie I’m taken by an outward bound adventure centre run by Tom McLean. He found a certain fame rowing the Atlantic and then sitting on Rockall, the lump of granite that sticks out of the North Atlantic as a perch for gannets and a gift to comedy, in order to claim it for her Britannic Majesty. McLean is Irish born so any claim by means of possession would itself be open to dispute. I went to one of these adventure centres run by  someone who had made a name making canoes on children’s television. The outward bound course was no better than you could devise for yourself and the whole thing was just another way of exploiting wilderness to make money and satisfy ego.

John Lennon and Yoko Ono a few days after the Scottish car crash in 1969 Photo credit unknown

In my father’s letter he said that John Lennon had crashed his Rolls Royce at Laxford Bridge in 1965. Other reports say that he got the car crash and the driver right but that the accident actually happened in Golspie in 1969 and that the car was an Austin Maxi. The incident hospitalised both Lennon and Yoko Ono and delayed the recording of the Abbey Road album by several days.

I keep going and going. There is a magnet that switches onto a particular destination after you’ve cycled a certain number of miles. This destination was Durness and the northern coast of Britain. I wanted to pedal out to Cape Wrath and stand on the corner of the country but neither time nor ferries would allow this. There is no road that goes right up the west coast to the cape. But even as I approach the Kyle of Durness, with the northern seas ahead of me, I find time for a last picnic stop on the high ground that commands the most inspiring view. I’m contemplating a night in the youth hostel and want to have a little bit of quiet time on the tops with a mug of tea before returning to the populated world.

 

 

Day 284: Happiness and Hurry Seldom Go Hand in Hand

Tags

Ardvreck Castle, Calda House, falling rocks, Loch Assynt, MacLeod, Mermaid of Loch Assynt, Sutherland

A Journey into Scotland … Part 47

The shores of Loch Assynt are undoubtedly beautiful, but this must be a tough place to live in anything other than the mildest weather. There is no visitor centre to destroy the lonely atmosphere of Ardvreck Castle. Just a sign to tell you to beware falling masonry. Plenty has fallen. The castle is a focal point for the glen but it hardly dominates it. Even close up it feels like a tiny place in a huge world. It’s built on a promontory that takes you out into the loch itself. When the rains come and the waters of the loch rise, it can become an island. I imagine that that would make it feel even more remote and desolate.

Once these lands were fought over. The very presence of the castle tells this story. It isn’t as old as it looks. Shakespeare was already in London writing plays when this was built. And it didn’t last all that long. This is MacLeod country and the castle was originally their assertion of ownership. The castle played its part in the Wars of the Three Kingdoms (that we in England, with characteristic insularity, tend to think of as The English Civil War). In 1672 the castle was seized by the clan MacKenzie. It continued for a while in a less than warlike state. The MacKenzies had seen  that the future lay in living in houses rather than castles and built the first classical house in Sutherland. Calda House was rather more comfortable against the strength of a Sutherland winter. But, it too was short lived.

Local folklore tells of the house and the castle rather better than the recorded history. Both buildings are ruins now. The castle was damaged in capture but rather left for the elements to destroy. The house burned down in 1737 in mysterious circumstances. Some suggest arson while a story is told of a lightening strike in the early hours of a Sunday morning. This being a place where religious fervour meets the supernatural, the story was one of punishment for failing to observe the Sabbath Day. The MacKenzies had been partying on a Saturday but continued with the feasting, the music, the drinking and the dancing long after midnight. The sole survivor was a piper who had refused to play on once Saturday night became Sunday morning.

The ruins of Calda House with Ardvreck Castle in the background.photo credit inch-lodge.co.uk

A story is also told of the devil coming to Loch Assynt to wreak vengeance.  He had helped to build the castle in return of a promise of the MacLeod’s daughter in marriage. The daughter, Eimhir chose rather to throw herself into the lake rather than become the devil’s bride. Eimhir was transformed into a silkie, or mermaid, and still lives in caverns under the water. When she cries over her fate the waters rise, cutting the castle off from the mainland. The devil took his revenge by hurling meteors into Sutherland. The stories are good ones and fit in with genuine phenomena: the waters do rise, there are caves beneath the waters and a large meteor did hit the region. The dates cause a bit of a problem. The castle was only built in 1590 and the meteor landed around 1.2 billion years earlier.

The lowering cloud casts shadows even on a sunless day. The surface of the water changes shade and colour every minute as the sky overhead changes. I see neither devil nor mermaid but neither would have surprised me. It is an enchanting place. But the chill wind brings my impromptu picnic to a close.

I thought I’d be wanting to push on. After all I was now within a day or so of my destination, but this land of mountains is having the opposite effect. Happiness and hurry don’t go hand in hand. My whole being has slowed down and I’m more than contented. The road forks: one road heading for the west coast and Lochinver and the other heads into the most magnificent mountains yet. Here the geology is revealed as moorland and munros. On my left the dark peaks and on my right the white. I find a hundred different ways of expressing amazement. Britain is a small island, so how can it be so vast? And I practically have it to myself.

I’m told that in the summer these roads can be bumper to bumper caravans driven by resolute couples (always the man driving) who have very carefully attached special extending mirrors to their vehicles and never seen the need to look in them. I’d originally planned on making this journey in the summer. It made more sense. Longer days. Warmer days. But I’d had to shelve those plans. At the time I’d felt that September and October were very much the second choice. I had actually hit the jackpot. The autumn weather was fierce at times. It was certainly ever-changing. But it was inspiring and invigorating. You felt you’d been out in it and you felt better for having been so. The real bonus was having the roads to myself. For much of my journey, the asphalt ribbon was just about the only man made thing I could see. The rest was silence. Slow, solitary cycling at the back end of the year was the way I saw this splendour and it would be the way I would choose to see it again. Except next time I’d take longer. I’d park the bicycle more often and I’d get myself a mile or two away from the tarmacadam  and up onto those peaks.

The road never runs straight for long in Sutherland. It bends and winds between the slabs of rock, past lochans and peat bog. Every so often a boulder the size of several busses shows that ice has played its part in shaping this magnificence. I pedal along emitting a different way of saying “wow” every minute.

Sometimes the clouds lift and sometimes they descend. The aspect is changed completely. All landscapes look different is sunshine or rain. This landscape became different places. With a hint of brightness it welcomes you. With a hint of rain it becomes very forbidding indeed. Under heavy cloud all the rocks were dark. When the sun broke through it brought with it a range of colours that had been hidden. The white uplands and the dark peaks would be joined by scars of pink and ridges of yellow and rust and gold.

Where the cliffs were next to the road the falling rocks road sign would blaze out its warning. It is the most eye catching,  the most comical and the scariest of the British road signs. Boulders falling off a mountainside are eye catching. Depicting them with such a literal picture is both scary and a gift to humour. It may also be the most useless of the road signs. It’s very nice that the road engineers have drawn your attention to the fact that half that hillside may suddenly fall on top of you, or that a half ton rock is about to bean you out of the saddle. The question remains as to just what precautions you are supposed to take. I don’t take any. Leaving my well-being in the hands of the mountains I plough on slowly and steadily through beauty that, to my mind, is the very best that Scotland has to offer. For ten days it had been getting better day by day. It had finally arrived at perfection.

 

 

 

 

Day 278: Shoulders of Giants

Tags

Ben Peach, Charles Lapworth, Cycle tour of Scotland, geology, James Hutton, John Horne, Loch Erribol, Lord Kelvin, Professor Iain Stewart, Roderick Murchison, Scotland, Smoo Cave, Sutherland

A Journey into Scotland in 1987 … Part 41

Up here in Sutherland the earth feels ancient. I’m cycling through the oldest landscape in Great Britain and between some of the oldest rocks on the surface of the earth. Just how old was a very big question in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It’s a question we think we may well have answered in the twenty first.

According to theologists, the earth was 4004 years plus the year you are measuring from. If it is 1750 then this will mean the earth is 5754 years old. Brilliant if you take a literal view of the bible (and this Christian believer’s belief is based on things being believable) but problematic if you are wondering how that fits in with 540 million year old fossils. Lord Kelvin was the first to make a serious attempt to work out how old the earth was and he did it more with the intention of establishing that the planet had an age rather than to establish just exactly what that age was. He was reacting to the idea put forward by James Hutton that the processes of the earth were on-going and had no obvious point of beginning and no foreseeable point of termination. In its way it is a re-affirmation of the position of ancient Greek philosopher Heroclitus of Ephesus who believed that nothing actually exists in itself but only as a constantly changing form on the way to becoming something else. In this view there is nothing other than flux. No beginning or end; just constant change. He famously expressed this idea by saying that no man can jump into the same river twice. (Geologists have more experience of testing this idea than most.)

James Hutton discusses philosophy with Scottish chemist Joseph Black. Etching by John Kaye National Portrait Gallery

Hutton’s way of expressing it was to say that he saw “no vestige of a beginning and no prospect of an end”. Kelvin thought this was nonsensical and set out to measure the age of the earth so he could say that there most certainly was a beginning.

According to Lord Kelvin, the earth was molten when it first formed  If you can time how long a measured amount of molten rock takes to cool  to earth temperature, then you can tell how old the earth is. He came up with the answer that the earth was between 20 and 40 million years old. This displeased everybody:

• it was far too old for the creationists. There would have to be an awful lot more begetting in the gospels to link Jesus’ lineage to Abraham.
• It was far too young for the Darwinists. Evolution couldn’t have performed its task in so short a time
• his calculations were based on the entire earth cooling which would have ruled out Hutton’s other idea that the centre of the earth remains red hot and that this heat powers many of the changes in the earth’s geology.

We now know that the earth is 4.6 billion years old and that some of the rocks in north west Scotland have been around for more than two thirds of that span. The rock known as Lewisian Gneiss has been accurately measured as being over 3129 million years old. We know these figures are accurate because we have been told so by the most reliable source there is: by the rocks themselves. (The secret lies in discovering radioactivity and knowing that it is a natural and not a man made phenomenon.)

Lord Kelvin

A third great Scottish scientist enters the scene in the middle of the nineteenth century. Roderich Murchison, like many scientists at the time, was a wealthy man with time on his hands looking for something to do. Either his wife or Sir Humphrey Davy should be credited with suggesting that he gave up fox-hunting and take up geology. The first half of his career was very successful and he was part of the group of thinkers (which included Charles Lyell and Charles Darwin) who were able to classify rocks according to their age. Having been knighted for his work he then went to the north of Scotland where he used all his influence, position , authority and academic record to establish an incorrect idea. Like Kelvin’s inaccurate and wrongly premised measuring of the age of the earth, this mistake held up geological research for decades. Put simply he asserted that the oldest rocks will be found at the bottom and any rocks on top of these must therefore be younger. It makes sense superficially but it denies other reasons why things end up on top.

Murchison’s geological map of northern Scotland followed his own findings and theory to say that the oldest rocks are to be found furthest west and that the rocks become progressively younger as you cross the country eastbound.

Roderick Murchison

The false finding in Murchson’s work was uncovered by a great enthusiast. The only major figure in this story who wasn’t a scot. Charles Lapworth was English, but lived in Scotland, married a Scottish wife and did much of his most important work on the mountains around Loch Eriboll in the north of Sutherland. Diligent and meticulous fieldwork found site after site where relatively young rock was found beneath rock that was by all standards of measurement (except Murchison’s) much older. He needed an explanation and he came up with one; a good one; one that worked then and which works now. An explanation, in short, that allowed further discoveries to be made. He put forward the idea that an enormous sideways force was acting on the rocks which pushed them. He devised a simple experiment to see what would happen. Inside a glass case he laid down layers of different coloured sands. Once he had a good number of these layers he slowly turned a wheel that moved the end wall of the case inwards. The sands were pushed further into the box and as they moved they began to form ripples and then wave patterns and eventually the lower layers were to be found going up and over the top of the layers that had originally been higher. His sands resembled, almost exactly, the patterns of rock layers he had found in the field. He had not only explained how older rocks can end upon top of younger rocks but had effectively explained the process of mountain building.

Charles Lapworth in the centre

It is interesting that it was an Englishman who explained how Scottish mountains were formed as it was England that played a major part in actually forming those mountains. Scotland provided the layers of sand/rocks; England provided a good part of the sideways force that gave us the Grampians, the Torridons, the Southern uplands; Ben More, Foinhaven and even Ben Nevis itself. But that part of the story is still to come. There remain a few pieces of the puzzle to put on the table.

Murchison was decidedly displeased. Two scientists, John Horne and Ben Peach, were sent to Sutherland to find evidence to disprove Lapworth or at least to undermine his theory. Scientists regard themselves as dealers with the truth but there are a remarkable number of instances where they put their personal reputations and (dare I say it) beliefs, before the scientific facts. Scientists tend to define themselves according to the work of the best of their type and not by the work of those whose efforts have held back the discovery of knowledge. At the same time scientists have developed something of a habit of condemning faith and religion on the grounds that some people follow paths of religion that are wrong, deluded or just plain evil. If we judge scientists by the weaker members of the sect then we have a pretty shabby bunch. But to judge any of us by our failings would leave few of us with much glory. Fortunately Horne and Peach were not the shabby sort.

Horne and Peach outside the Inchnedamph Hotel

They were sent to disprove a theory and came back having fairly conclusively provided the evidence for the theory to stand, and for science to be able to advance. What is more, they provided evidence to say that if there is a natural union for Scotland, it might make more sense for the country to form links with Canada or the USA rather than with England. They went into Smoo Cave (a place I will visit myself on this cycle journey) and came out with a good collection of trilobites. Nothing strange there. Trilobites had been found all over the British Isles. They are the fossilised remains of marine creatures that swam in warm shallow waters 500 million years ago.

Smoo Cave photo credit http://www.amazingplacesonearth.com

The trilobites that had been found in England were almost identical to the ones that had been found throughout mainland Europe. Those that were found by Horne and Peach were almost identical to trilobites found in Greenland, Newfoundland and north eastern parts of the North American continent. Something didn’t make sense.

Day 277: A Scottish Rock Star

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geography, geology, James Hutton, James Watt, Lewisian gneiss, Lord Kelvin, Professor Iain Stewart, Ross and Cromerty, Scotland, Sutherland, The Bible

A Journey into Scotland in 1987 … Part 40

A Diversion into the History of Geology Part One

We owe Scotland a great deal. If Ireland has given English literature most of its great writers and certainly its greatest comic writers then Scotland has given us most of our great economic thinkers, many of our greatest engineers and an above capita contribution to arts and culture. There is one field, above all of these, where Scotland has led not just Britain but the entire world and that is in the understanding of that world. It was a scotsman who undertook the first scientific attempt to put an age on the planet and it was a scotsman whose theory was being undermined by this attempt and another scotsman who found the fatal flaw in the dating process to show that it was actually the earlier scotsman who had been on the right lines.

Scotland has some of the most remarkable geology on the planet which may explain why it was in Scotland that the world gained a new science in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries: the science of geology. Understanding the planet was all very easy before these people started looking more closely at the fabulous rock formations of the Highlands. Before this group of brilliant Caledonian thinkers came along, there was only really one geological textbook. It has become, in our own century the most blindly adhered to, and the most scathingly derided book of historical physics of all time. It was, The Bible.

It seemed to be remarkably accurate and had an explanation for why everything was how it was. It was because it had been created that way during six days of most diligent labour. At a stroke the known universe was put in place from something without form and void. And the bible students of the eighteenth century had gathered enough evidence, from this official planetary handbook,  to be able to confidently state that the world was created in less than a week, and were also able to give an exact date and time for when the work began.

God rolled up his sleeves and set about making the world at 2 o’clock on Saturday the 22nd of October 4004 BC. He sat down to rest on the 29th. Everything that is became the way that it is during those six days. No need for geologists with theodolites and hammers to go marching off into the highlands to tell us differently.

But they went anyway. For some they undermined the laws of the universe and committed heresy. For others they were the very people who have given us more coherent theories and laws and a truer understanding of how the world came to be.

Much of the work was done in the stretch of Scotland I was about to cycle through. Of all the wondrous landscapes that Scotland had thrown at me during the first two weeks of my ride, I was about to enter the most wonderful. Welcome to Wester Ross and Sutherland. It simply doesn’t get better than this. It couldn’t.

I developed an interest in rocks and rock formations very early on. My elder brother had a collection of thumb and fist sized pieces of pink granite and a crystallised grey rock, that wasn’t quite as beautiful to look at. He’d collected them on days out in the north western highlands: from stream beds, from outcrops and from the beaches. Not surprisingly, he went on to become a geographer. I loved to look at them, to feel the hardness and even to strike the stones together and watch the sparks. These rocks seemed slightly dangerous to me. If I was a little more learned at the time, I might have been a little more entranced by their danger. They would have set a geiger counter ticking. Both the granite and the Lewisian Gneiss (for that was the grey rock) were (very mildly) radioactive.

Professor Iain Stewart Photo credit BBC

A few years ago Professor Iain Stewart had half the population of the country tuning in to his history of Scottish geology at weekday teatimes. He has an engaging manner, a deep knowledge and infectious enthusiasm for his subject that you’d like every teacher to possess. For a few weeks, what had fascinated my brother and I, caught the imagination of the country. In this sense I think of it as landmark television. It was certainly landscape television.

In the first two programmes he took us deep into the remotest areas of this north west part of Scotland and introduced us to the men who looked at the mountains and couldn’t stop asking the  same question: how on earth did that get to be like that? Some were Christian believers and some were atheists. Some allowed science to rule and make discoveries. Some were held back by having a pre-conceived idea in their minds. These were not always the ones you’d expect them to be. God fearing James Hutton was able to move away from a literal reading of the bible to come up with a theory that completely undermined the accepted theological standpoint of his time.

“Amazingly, for something conceived two hundred and fifty years ago, it is nearly all right. It is a big coherent, impressive idea; and his concept of the earth as a system – continually self-renewing – feels so modern.” (Iain Stewart)

Hutton was the first to realise that the process of erosion, that washed the soil from the fields of the family farm into drainage ditches and on into streams and rivers, would result in two things. One, the gradual sedimentary effect on the sea floor that would lead to the formation of new rocks. Two, that this seemingly would eventually lead to a completely barren landscape where all the fertile soil had been washed away. He noticed that despite millennia of erosion the landscape was still rather fertile. He had many accurate insights during his lifetime. One of these was that the creation of land and destruction of land go together and are not the result of some sudden and dramatic events in the biblical past, but are slow and imperceptible and are happening all the time and continue to happen. Hutton gave to modern science the concept of deep time. Before Hutton the earth was thousands of years old, after Hutton we knew that it was many millions.

In Hutton’s own words. “There was no vestige of a beginning and no prospect of an end.”

His second insight was that not all of the rocks in Scotland were formed by the sedimentary process. That many were (like the granite and the gneiss in my brother’s collection) formed by rocks becoming molten and then solidifying. Once he’d accepted that some rocks began life in a molten state the question for Hutton was why were they all so different?

Hutton, like many truly great thinkers, spent a lot of time studying and discussing outside his own field of interest. He was a friend of another great Scot, James Watt; the man who turned steam into an efficient form of power; and by doing so enabled the Industrial Revolution. By discussing ideas with Watt, Hutton came to be of the belief that the earth could also have a central core of heat that acted as an engine or driving force to changes in the landscape. He was right, but not many, including Lord Kelvin the great physicist, were prepared to believe he was right.

His time working among the crucibles and furnaces of Watt’s world also gave him the answer to how once molten rocks could have such great variety. He saw glass that had been melted and cooled rapidly and, almost by accident, he saw glass that had been melted and cooled very slowly. All such cooling leads to the formation of crystals but the rapidly cooled glass formed tiny crystals and was consequently transparent or translucent. The slowly cooling glass formed much larger crystals and was barely recognisable as glass at all. He concluded that molten rocks will have different properties according to how long they took to cool. This explained the great variations.

Photo Credit Bouncing Bertie

His third great insight was to recognise that, if there was indeed a molten core to the earth, then there would be places where the molten rock actually intrudes into pre-existing sedimentary rock: that it would squeeze itself into the gaps and the cracks. He left the workshops and study rooms of Edinburgh and did what everybody should do at some stage of their life. He went out into the glens of Scotland and had a very good look round. In Glen Lilt was the evidence he was looking for. He found pink granite, almost identical to that owned by my bother, that had squeezed itself, in its molten state, between the gaps of grey sandstone. 

It wasn’t enough to convince the great minds of those of his own age who already had the answer (the wrong one) but it proved enough to convince later geologists to take up their hammers and to go on to make further discoveries. Science is about passing on the batten. Hutton had run the first lap of this relay and run it well. He was the first to see the true history of the planet written in the Scottish landscape. The batten was dropped (largely by Lord Kelvin), and lay on the track for the best part of sixty years. But it was picked up again and tomorrow I’ll have a look at the work done by some more of the great Scotsmen who gave us our true understanding of the way the planet really came to be.