Britain looks like a finished, fixed island. It is not. It is a see-saw, caught mid-tilt.

The north is rising out of the sea by a few millimetres a year. The south is settling by about the same. The pivot runs somewhere across the Midlands, and the whole plank has been moving for twelve thousand years, ever since the last ice sheet let go of Scotland.

In this one I walk you from the rising end to the sinking end. The raised beaches of the Highlands, stranded high in the air. The Parallel Roads of Glen Roy that even Darwin read wrong. The fastest-rising ground in Britain at Edinburgh, and the fastest-sinking coast at Lowestoft. Why the south-east is hit twice over, and what the whole tilt does to the one number every British map is measured from.

This is a plain account of how one place got the way it is. I have kept it to what the ground and the record actually show. Where the science is still arguing, I will say so.

#geology #britain #scotland