Have you ever wondered what has shaped the landscape here? Northumberland and the Borders have a treasure chest of rocks telling so many different stories in a landscape of extraordinary beauty. Northumbrian Earth has been set up to explore and tell these stories, to the local communities, to visitors and to businesses. You can explore these stories, walking out into our beautiful coast and countryside, and looking at the rocks in the company of Dr Ian Kille, an expert and enthusiast on all things geological.
It is a pleasure to annonce that for the first time since 2019 there will be a full schedule of geo-diversity walks along the Northumberland Coast AONB this year. I will be returning once more to all the best locations on the coast with new information, some new discoveries and a great deal of enthusiasm for being able to be out and running these walks once more.
I have decided to make these walks bookable to ensure that the number of people attending is manageable so that I can make it as good an experience as I can for everyone. There will be many fabulous rocks and fossils to find all in the glorious land and seascape of the AONB. You canfind all teh details of these walks in the geowalk section.
The Hadrian's Wall Community Archaeology Project (WallCAP) continues to run but is now in a phase of analysis and writing. There will be some events escpecially around the Hadrian's Wall 1900 celebrations. These will be posted here in due course and you can find out more about what is happening on Hadrian's Wall by going to the WallCAP website.
The new, fully updated edition of the Northumberland Coast Rocks! including a new set of maps and artwork, is still available. To order a copy just email me and payment can be sorted either by bank transfer or by cheque.
The rocks in Northumberland and the Borders are ancient. They are as rich in interest as those of the Dorset coast but much older and speak of a time when amphibians and giant insects were the height of evolution. By looking at the cycles of rock on the coast we can build a picture of seas filled with corals, sea lilies and brachiopods and vast deltas including swamps crowded with giant tree ferns. Come and join one of Ian's regular walks and start exploring this ancient world.
Bamburgh Castle and Lindisfarne Castle sit on top of black crags which are all part of the Whin Sill. Along the beautiful exposures of this unique feature on the coast we can look at how this vast slug of molten rock was injected between the sheaves of sedimentary rock. Away from the coast the grand range that is the Cheviot marks the bare roots of an ancient volcano.
Geology gives a wonderfull perspective on things. It was a local rock hero James Hutton who used the rocks at Siccar Point to show the enormity of time required to allow geological processes to build the sequences of rocks we see. In this 4.5 billion year history we find the evidence to show how the amazing fluidity of the earth's mechanism works. We can discover how this mechanism allows continents to track inexorably across the globe, colliding and reforming with all the consequent volcanoes and earthquakes, folding and faulting, melting and squeezing. Starting from the rocks beneath our feet in Northumberland and the Borders we can explore the evidence.