Coincidence

A happy synchronicity yesterday, when I found a book on James Hutton's work at the bookfair, 'The Man who Found Time', by Repcheck. It opens with a quote from SJ Gould-

He burst the boundaries of time, thereby establishing geology's most distinctive and transforming contribution to human thought- Deep Time.

Hutton's birthplace, workplace and research lab was the landscape around the Lothians, so this is redolent with known places and images. Hutton's theory had aeons of geological activity laying down strata of minerals both during slow sedimentary and erosion phases and saltational volcanic and siesmological events. He proves it to himself and skeptics Playfair and Hall when they find the hypothesised sequence in an observation of a horizontal stratum of Old Red Sandstone lying on top of older, vertically-twisted graywhacke in the shorecliffs of East Lothian.

Furthermore, I learn that the Gutted Haddie, a gully between peaks at the summit of Arthur's Seat, only came into being in 1744, when a dramatic landslide following storms cleared the surface rock, exposing the hard volcanic stone underneath. Hutton had recommenced University studies, this time of medicine, at the time of this event. He would have been living with his sisters and mother in the Old Town, perhaps on the Lawnmarket just down the hill from the Castle on the Royal Mile's slide down to Holyrood and Arthur's Seat.

There's an 1830 clickable, zoomable Old Town map of the Royal Mile here.



Also, sau may be interested the learn of a small brass plaque, badly in need of a polish, on a block next to the Assembly Rooms in Edinburgh's New Town. I noticed this for the first time yesterday. It marks 60 George St, where Shelley and his wife Harriet honeymooned in 1811, shortly before her suicide. I'm tempted to go back with the Brasso™ and give it a buff as a mark of respect.