The road to the oils

Abstract

It is not every year that we cross the threshold of a New Millennium! For reasons unknown, governments around the World decided that when midnight struck on the last day of 1999 we would move through this mystical timewarp. The Royal Greenwich Observatory would have preferred us to wait another year. Whichever, such an occasion does provide an opportunity for looking back in time and for trying to look ahead. Inevitably, reminiscences are personal. However, the more I explored my thoughts the more I became aware that my most acute memories are not just personal, but are inextricably interwoven with apparently disparate events in the history of Scottish Geology. These have a bearing on local heroes, the path of the Industrial Revolution, Scottish lighthouses, a weather station on Ben Nevis, the Geological Society of Glasgow, Professors of Geology, Geological Survey maps, and concerns about climate change. ‘ The events in our lives happen in a sequence in time, but in their significance to ourselves they find their own order’. Eudora Welty’s words are profoundly relevant. It is the interconnectedness of events with each other and with my most vivid personal recollections, that forms the basis for this Millennium article. Like the history of the Earth, the story of these events is written in rock. Initially, in a small piece of non-descript brownish-black rock picked up by a casual prospector 150 years ago in a field some 2 miles east of Armadale, West Lothian. This was originally thought to be coal . . .