For the past 4,000 years we humans have been making an impact on our natural landscape - whether it be exploiting our natural resources, cutting down trees for building, firewood and to expose agricultural land, or searching for precious metals like gold and silver to make weapons, jewellery and coins. We have even used our landscape to make religious and political statements, like the Cerne Abbas Giant chalk figure.

While we can all understand ‘historical time’, like the Medieval period, the Romans, Saxons and Vikings, which takes us back to about 2,000 years ago; ‘archaeological time’ takes us back even further through the Iron, Bronze and Stone age, Neanderthals and back to the first Homo Sapiens, almost a 100 thousand years ago. But this is nothing, ‘geological time’, measured in millions of years, takes us right back to the beginning of the earth over 4,600 million years ago.

What’s beneath our feet?
Most of us have probably picked up an attractive pebble on the beach, or found an unusual rock in the garden, or maybe your house or local church is made out of a particular stone. Depending on where you live the rocks beneath your feet will be quite different, because they formed at different times and in different environments.

The rocks of Britain provide a physical record of the past and ancient history of our island and they have changed over time according to the climate and the movement of the earth’s plates. They show that the UK has been drifting like a ‘passenger’ on its tectonic plate, beginning somewhere south of the equator and ending up in the northern latitudes where we are now. On the way the UK has formed rocks and sediments typical of those environments. Going out and looking at the rocks in your local area will give you a clue to the ‘geological history’ of the UK. But how do you know what you’re looking at?

We mainly see rocks in cliffs and road cuttings, but rocks also lie below the vegetation and soil in every landscape. Some of these rocks are useful as building stones, others are the source of valuable and precious metals. Rocks can seem to be a permanent feature of our landscape, but in fact they are being created, destroyed and recreated all the time. Over millions of years, volcanoes erupt, mountains are built, these are eroded by water and ice, and the rock fragments are laid down in rivers and on the seabed, only to be crumpled up to form mountains and eroded again, in a continuous cycle of processes that goes on to the present day.

The different rocks making up the surface of the earth form in different ways, and the processes involved leave their mark on the rocks they produce.

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