The Shape of Britain

Abstract

The address focuses upon the major stages in the geomorphological development of Britain and the processes which have fashioned its shape. The approach is retrospective in character in accordance with the decrease in available evidence the farther back in time one goes, so that greatest weight is given to changes in the past million years. An attempt is made to justify the continued study of the evolution of land shape both in geomorphology and geography. WHEN it became obvious some three years ago at the Coventry meeting that I would be called upon to deliver this Presidential Address, I began to ask members of the Institute the form they thought a Presidential address should take. Two pieces of advice I received were, 'Don't preach' and 'Stick to your last'. I shall find it difficult to avoid an element of preaching but I have resolved to make the subject one I ought to know something about. For the majority of you it is a topic which is unlikely to be your first love but I hope that even so selective a review of geographical science will be informative, for I was also told by many that they welcomed the opportunity to broaden their horizons, however fleetingly. I shall be reflecting upon the formative stages in the geomorphological evolution of Britain and the direction that future research in this field might possibly take. This narrow intent calls for further justification to this audience on at least three counts. First, it implies that geomorphology is a geographical study, secondly it adopts a regional approach when such a paradigm is regarded by most geographers as passe, thirdly it seeks to examine the evolutionary aspects of landforms when process-response systems are more fashionable. My theoretical approach is avowedly historical, I am about to spin an ingenious historical saga, and compose accurate phrases based on stratigraphy (Chorley, 1978, p. 6), an approach to geomorphology which in Professor Chorley's view is about as outdated as it is possible to be. Concerning the first, geography for me is defined satisfactorily either as the study of the areal differentiation of the earth's surface or as the study of man's relation to his environment; but I will confess that if I were today given the task of redefining major fields of scientific endeavour I would label one physical earth science and include within it geomorphology, two other fields I would call biological earth science and geography and the latter would not include geomorphology. But geomorphological differences do contribute to the areal differentiation of the earth's surface and geomorphology is part of man's environment. It was largely through historical accident that in Britain, the study of geomorphology was abandoned in the first half of the twentieth century by geologists in the mistaken belief that it was not a field of enquiry which