Tag: scottish landscape

The next time you're huffing and puffing up a steep mountain track, take a moment to consider why we even have mountains to explore. Nothing lasts in nature. Given time, lots and lots of time, towering mountain ranges wear down, expansive continents erode and vast oceans dry up and fade into obscurity. Take the Caledonian Mountains, for example. It is difficult for our minds to grasp the concepts of geological time. While we are well-used to economists throwing around figures of billions of euro and trillions of dollars, it is nonetheless very difficult for us to imagine a timespan of hundreds of millions of years. The Caledonian Mountains started forming some 438 million years ago. They got pushed up slowly as one of the results of ancient continents colliding with each other. Enormous forces were unleashed during the collision as the former continents rammed into each other. During a head-on crash of two cars the bonnets crumple and are thrust up into folds. Something similar happens during the head-on collisions of continents only it happens in extreme slow motion; so slowly, in fact, that the momentum of the gently moving continents carries the process on over millions of years. During the ancient continental collision, existing rocks crumpled and folded and the mountain chain emerged. In our part of the world the Caledonian mountain range stretched from Ireland to Scotland, formed the spine of Norway and continued into parts of Sweden and Greenland. The name ' Caledonian' is derived from the study of the ancient mountain range in Scotland; when the Romans invaded Britain they used the placename Caledonia for the territory we now call Scotland. The Caledonian mountains are long-gone as a continuous mountain range. Much of the range has eroded and has been recycled. However, isolated bits of the