Off Topic Friday: Fingal's Cave I

[BrentW]

My first attempt at a mixed media (watercolour + oil pastel) picture of Fingal's Cave. These was painted from a reference photograph snapped as I passed by it on a recent cruise.

[FredaE]

wow WE WERE there on a cruise too this spring as we can no longer cope with the drive and northern scotland is one of our favourite places and I was intrduced to Orkney and Shetland.. really wonderful. Did you enjoy t?

[BrentW in reply to FredaE]

Though I have travelled widely, FredaE, I know there is much amazing beauty to be found in the British Isles. Just yesterday I went for a walk with a friend along some of the coastline north of New Quay. We were inspired on scales from the most amazing beds of rock, contorted by folds millions of years old, to a delicate wasps' nest in the hedgerow where we had parked.

So, I REALLY enjoyed this cruise. It had two items on my bucket list -- though MrsW did not know this when she was booking it. On Lewis I saw (and collected a small chunk of) the oldest rocks on the British Isles: the Lewisian Gneisses. This three billion year old formation probably underlays most of the British Isles. Being metamorphic, its age only reflects that of when it was metamorphosed -- not what from or how much older. I am guessing it was once a simple mud, but now it is as hard as the proverbial rock. Then on Mainland Orkney we moved to the other end of the scale at Skara Brae. There I stared down into late Stone Age houses and saw how the people there had made themselves hearths, beds, chairs, dressers, and a bucket of sorts for keeping bait in. These 5000 year old people, in other words, had developed all the creature comforts that we would have wanted while living off whatever the coastline could provide. Why was it abandoned so suddenly? I think one hypothesis has not been explored: that these sedentary farmers and fisher-people, living on the impoverished soil, had exhausted the resources.

So, this was as much as the holiday of a lifetime as I have had. I don't wish to melodramatise, but I hope I manage to squeeze in another before long.

[FredaE in reply to BrentW]

newquay is near to us.heres a photo of the northern isles. such marvelous places both Jarlshof and Skara Brae. there is a place in western Cornwall where the contortions have brought rocks to the surface from deep inthe earths crust

neolithic living room