 
I was in Scotland a couple of weeks back, which is always a blessing. With my father being a Scot it is always a homecoming and a privilege to be able to go there. One of the places I have been meaning to visit for years is Siccar point, which is just 12 miles up the coast from where my father grew up. His father was the minister at Coldingham Priory which dates back to 1147 and so it has always been a special place for us as a family, so much so that we scattered my father’s ashes in the churchyard back in 2014. The focus therefore was always on family matters when we in the Scottish Borders, so Siccar Point has always eluded me, but at long last I have stood on one of the most famous places in geology.
Why is it so famous? Well, James Hutton, who is the father of modern geology, farmed in the Borders, during which time he devoted his thoughts to how the Earth had formed. In 1788, in the company of James Hall and John Playfair, he took a boat ride to Siccar Point to observe the angular unconformity which gave him the proof to his theory of Uniformitarianism.
Standing there on the point with the gulls wheeling overhead and the cold North Sea breaking onto the rocky shoreline,  I was able to see the gently dipping, 370 million year old, Old Red Sandstone resting on the startlingly vertical sediments of the 435 million year old Llandovery Greywackes. The time period between the two episodes of deposition is in the order of 65 million years. Proof indeed that the world was dynamic and always in a state of flux, and far older than anyone could ever have imagined.
The site is well sign posted and an easy work over meadows and dry stone walls. The descent down to the point from the clifftops above is another story mind you, and I had to hang onto the stout wires of the fence as I scrambled down what was little more than a goat path. My shoes were for city streets rather than rocky shores so that didn’t help either, but it was all worth it in the end. And so, at long last, I stood on this piece of sacred, historical ground and took in the beautiful views along the Berwickshire coast and marvelled and the rocks which lay underfoot.
