This Volcanic Isle: The Violent Processes that Forged the British Landscape
Robert Muir-Wood (Oxford University Press, £20)
The hills are shadows, and they flow, From form to form, and nothing stands; They melt like mist, the solid lands, Like clouds they shape themselves and go.
(Tennyson, ‘In Memoriam’)
GEOLOGY? A bit like economics, the famously boring science? I confess I suffered the prejudice—agriculture and history being my thing, both of them vital in every sense—but Robert Muir-Wood’s voyage through the past 66 million years of the making of the British landscape has biblical-level drama on almost every other page. Flood, fire, ice… or, perhaps, the formation in rock, sand, mud and lava of these isles is best conceived of as fierce poetry. There is a knowingness in the author’s dotted, select quotations from Tennyson (‘the most scientifically literate of poets’); the proper telling of the island creation story requires imagination, as well as stone-cold fact and theory.
What a geological). In Sussex, the chalk layer is 560m (1,837ft) thick—once, we were inhabitants of Albion, the white land, from the same word-root as albino.
