Landscape in History, and Other Essays

by Archibald Geikie

Here, surely, our literary censor may claim that no room can be found for the foot of science. What can we pretend to add to the charm of such scenery; or what can we do, if we touch it at all, but lessen that charm? Again, I accept the challenge, though with perhaps somewhat more diffidence; not that I think the contribution from science is here less available or less appropriate, but because I so fully share in the feeling that a scene, in itself and to the ordinary eye so full of everything that can give pleasure, needs no addition from any source.

Let me suppose that we are placed upon the extreme western verge of the down, with the Needles in front of us. The chalk that forms these white faces of rock is shown by science to be made up entirely of the mouldered remains of creatures that gathered on the sea-bottom, ages before the species of animals living at the present day came into existence. Sponges, crinoids, corals, shells, fishes, reptiles, mingled their remains with those of the minuter forms of life that accumulated on the floor of that ancient ocean. And now, hardened into stone, the ooze of that sea-bed has been upraised into land. The 'long backs of the bushless downs,' which for many successive centuries have remained as we see them, were originally parts of the sea-bed, and are entirely built up of the vestiges of dead organisms.

But this is not all. Look at one of those noble faces of rock which shoot up from the restless breakers, and take note of the parallel lines of dark flints which, as if traced with a pencil, sweep in such graceful curves from base to crest of the cliffs. Alike on buttress and recess, from headland to headland, no matter how irregularly the chalk has been sculptured, these parallel lines may be followed. A feature so conspicuous in the architecture of the precipices could not escape the attention of the most casual visitor, but he only vaguely marvels at it, until geology tells him that these dark lines mark successive floors of that ancient sea—floors that gathered one over another, as generation after generation of marine creatures left their crumbling remains upon the bottom. But now they are bent up and placed on end, like books on the shelves of a library. And thus we learn that not only has this ancient sea-bed been turned into dry land, but its layers of hardened ooze have been tilted up vertically, and that it is the worn ends of these upturned layers which form the long ridges of the downs.

But science further makes known to us that beyond the cliffy margin on which we stand, there once stretched an ampler land that has long disappeared. Far over the English Channel the chalk downs once extended with their undulating summits, their smooth grassy slopes, their deep cooms and quiet bournes. That vanished land ran southward, until it ended off in a range of white precipices. The rain that fell on its surface gathered into a river that flowed northward through Freshwater Gap into the Solent. Strange to tell, perched on the top of the present cliffs, to the east of Freshwater, lie fragments of the bed of that ancient stream, consisting of gravel and silt which, as the cliffs are undermined by the waves, tumble to the beach and mingle with the gravel of to-day. In these ancient deposits are found teeth of the long-extinct mammoths which browsed the herbage on slopes that rose southward, where for many a long age the Atlantic has rolled its restless tides and breakers.

Musing on these records of a dim forgotten past, we once more turn to the last spurs of chalk and the isolated Needles. There, with eye quickened to recognise what science has to reveal, we trace on every feature of the rocky foreground, inscribed in characters that cannot be mistaken, the story of that process of destruction which has reduced the Isle of Wight to its present diminished proportions. The rains, frosts, and tempests splinter the chalk above and the waves gnaw it away below. Year by year fresh slices are cut off and strewn in fragments over the sea-floor by the unwearying surge. The Needles, once part of the down, are perceptibly less than they were a generation ago. The opposite white cliffs and downs of Dorset were at one time continuous with those of the Isle of Wight. They too, by their shattered precipices, tunnelled caverns, and isolated stacks of rock, tell the same tale of disintegration. And, thus, impressive though the scenery was before, it now acquires a new interest and significance, when every cliff and pinnacle becomes eloquent to us of a past so strange, so remote, and yet so closely linked with our own day by a chain of slow and unbroken causation.

And now, as a last illustration, let me conduct the reader in imagination to the far north-west of Scotland and place him on the craggy slopes above the upper end of Loch Maree as the sun, after a day of autumnal storm, is descending towards the distant Hebrides in a glory of crimson, green, and gold. Hardly anywhere within the compass of our islands can a landscape be beheld so varied in form and colour, so abounding in all that is noblest and fairest in our mountain scenery. To the right rises the huge mass of Slioch, catching on his terraced shoulders the full glow of sunset, and wreathing his summit with folds of delicate rose-coloured cloud. To the left, above the purple shadows that are now gathering round their base, tower the white crags and crests of Ben Eay, rising clear and sharp against the western sky. Down the centre, between these two giant buttresses, lies Loch Maree—the noblest sheet of water in the Scottish Highlands—now ablaze with the light of the sinking sun. Headland behind headland, and islet after islet rise as bars of deep violet out of that sea of gold. Yonder a group of pines, relics of the old Caledonian forest, stand boldly above the rocky knolls. Around us the naked rock undulates in endless bosses, dotted with boulders or half-buried in the deep heather that flames out with yet richer crimson in the ruddy light filling all the valley. Overhead, the banded cliffs of Craig Roy, draped with waterfalls and wet with the rains of the earlier part of the day, glow in the varying tints of sunset. We hear the scream of the eagles that still nest in these inaccessible crags; the hoarse outcry of the heron comes up from the lake; the whirr of the black-cock re-echoes down the hill-side. It might seem as if we were here out of sight and hearing of man, save that now and then the low of cattle, driven home to their stalls, falls faintly on the ear from the distant hamlet, which is fading into the gathering twilight of the glen.

At such a time and in such a scene the past speaks vividly to us, if there be human associations of a bygone time linked with the place. Here, in this remote Highland valley, we are led backward in imagination through generations of strife and rapine, clan warfare and private revenge, bravery and treachery, superstition and ignorance, far away to that early time when, in the seventh century, Maelrubha, the red priest from Ireland, preached to the savage Picts, and first brought this region within the ken of civilised men. More than twelve hundred years have since passed away, but the memory of that early missionary still lives here among the solitudes which he chose as the scene of his labours. The lake yet bears his name, and his favourite island of retirement, embowered in holly, mountain ash, and honeysuckle, contains his holy well, which, even to this day, is visited for the cure of diseases, while offerings are there made to the saint.

It is just this little touch of 'the still, sad music of humanity' which is needed to crown the interest and dignity of our Highland landscape. 'What more, then, can we need or desire?' our literary critic may once more demand; 'you may go on to elaborate the details of the scene, for every part of the picture abounds in the most exquisite detail, beyond the power of pen or almost of pencil adequately to pourtray. But what can science do here, except to mar what already is perfect, or to confuse by contributing what is entirely irrelevant?'

Again I feel the force of the objection, and all the more because to combat it as I should wish to do, would involve me in geological details which would here be wholly out of place. Let me say, briefly and decidedly, that after many years of experience in every variety of landscape in this country, I know nowhere a scene which has its true inner meaning as a source of impressiveness more strikingly revealed, or which has its ordinary interest more vividly intensified by the light which geological history throws upon it.

The most cursory traveller, even as he drives rapidly along this valley, can hardly fail to observe that three distinct rocks enter into the composition of the landscape, each differing from the others in form, colour, and relative position, and each contributing its own characteristic features to the scenery. First of all a series of curiously hummocky eminences of dark grey rock mounts from the edge of the lake up the sides of Slioch, forming a kind of rude and rugged platform on which that mountain stands. Next comes a pile of brownish red sandstone, which in parallel and almost horizontal bars, like so many courses of cyclopean masonry, forms the upper and main mass of the height. And lastly, there is the bedded white rock which, hanging upon the flanks of the red sandstone, towers in the cliffs of Craig Roy on the one side of the valley and builds up almost the whole of Ben Eay on the other side. The differences and contrasts between these three kinds of material are so marked, and have obviously played so essential a part in producing the special peculiarities of the rocky landscape, that even our literary censor himself could hardly, in spite of himself, fail to note them and might venture to ask a question about them.