Deep Past : Intro.

This is an introduction to my 'Deep Past' series. You have found it either on my bike routes website (pootler.co.uk) or my gallimaufry (oildrumlane.co.uk)

My aim was to produce a brief, phone-friendly, jargon-free and high-level summary of the origin and nature of the general features of the landscape of this area, leaving finer detail to other posts. It turned out that you have to dig deep, and then keep digging, deeper and deeper. 

This involves many compromises, so it will be thin gruel. I cannot pose as any sort of expert, but I have done some homework and stuck to mainstream interpretations and explanations for a lot of this stuff, even when these are disputed. If you can tell me how to improve it without lengthening it, please do.  Note that the series is not a single linear narrative. I have diverted or disappeared down the odd rabbit hole, where I think it adds to the story. 

Posts 1 - 5 take you from the creation (!) through to the arrival of humans.

Posts 6 - 9 stretch to feudal times with more about the inhabitants.

Posts 10 - 13 look at the gradual creation of the rural landscape you see today. 

In the oildrumlane series, the last two posts differ from the pootler series in taking a wider perspective. 

I like the analogy of an ancient pub which has changed a lot over time. Sitting in it, you see the decorations and furnishings but struggle to envision how the whole place fits together and looks the way it does. So my aim here is to start by descending into the cellar and digging up the floor to check the foundations, and then inspecting the brickwork before moving on to the recent but questionable improvements and décor.   

Of course, you might have a view of how it all started, your very own creation myth.  Personally, I believe in Terry Pratchett's version. The idea that we are surfing on the back of a giant turtle is also found in Hinduism, as well as other Indian, Chinese and Native American religions. That cannot be a coincidence, can it?  

The Great A'Tuin

Terry even foresaw the subsequent management issues: 

"Some people", – and here the creator looked sharply at the unformed matter still streaming past – “think it’s enough to install a few basic physical formulas and then take the money and run.  A billion years later you got leaks all over the sky, black holes the size of your head, and when you pray up to complain there’s just a girl on the counter who says she don’t know where the boss is." 

Top scientists now believe that Terry's take on this isn't entirely supported by the evidence. Turtles steer a steady course, but the Earth doesn't. Its axis isn't vertical, and it wobbles and wanders in its orbit around the Sun. Hence seasons, but also some massive longer-term changes in the climate. If we turned our carbon-fuelled heaters off and left the planet to its own devices, we should be welcoming the glaciers back in 50,000 years or so.

And that isn't the only agent of long-term radical change in our environment. The planet and its surface are themselves restless. Change is the only constant, as I will explain in the next post in this series: Link : Hell to High Water