Last month I went north, up the west coast of Scotland and out to the Western Isles. It was, as always, hauntingly beautiful – that smashed-up wilderness, fragmented first by the forces of nature and subsequently by the forces of capitalism (aka the Highland Clearances).I didn’t really go for that beauty though, it was just a bonus; I went to see the rocks dance. I don’t here mean the extraordinary way that the small islands along that coast appear to dance on the waves when it is sunny. I wanted to put my two hands on either side of the Moine Thrust, a dark line along the Knockan Crag, where Ben Peach and John Horne finally resolved a century-long argument and in 1907 proved (to almost everyone’s satisfaction) that rocks do move. Moine was the first scientifically
30 July 2015, The Tablet
The movement of rocks makes me think about Petrine authority
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