reading rocks

Send us Fan Mail Reading the story of the Earth through its rocks has been likened to reading a book with 90% of its pages missing. An incredible tale and fertile ground for the imagination for sure. But everything in this two-part short story is based on sound scientific, archaeological and historical evidence. Part Two - the final two chapters of the story - may be a speculative look into our fu...

Send us Fan Mail Part two of this short geo-fiction story looks forward 40 years and 100,000 years. It may be a speculative look into our future but it draws nonetheless on forensic climate projections and impacts which have been generated by reputable scientists. Reading the story of the Earth through its rocks has been likened to reading a book with 90% of its pages missing. An incredible tale a...

Send us Fan Mail Its time to get to grips with how people and rocks connect. And first in ancient societies. So we will be occupying the overlap – more no-mans-land – between geology and archaeology. The two subjects  - just like rocks and humans - are inextricably linked. Our ancient ancestors relationship with their natural landscape – that is its rocks – was intimate. Rocks and sediments provid...

Send us Fan Mail Our tectonic plates continued their erratic waltz north. All the while billions of tonnes of sediments were deposited, turned to rock, tilted up here and there and then eroded away. 60 million years ago lava started to pour out of an enormous rift that was to become the Atlantic Ocean. North America and Europe have been drifting apart ever since.  2.6 million years ago the Earth‘s...

Send us Fan Mail This episode starts with injection of molten rock across northern England a rock that is responsible for a huge chunk of our tourist economy. Then it takes a tour of hot deserts, evaporating salty seas,  and finally our secret bit of every fossil hunters dream rock. On the way we’ll hear about plots to blow up a famous stone circle, dispose of nuclear waste, a mass global extincti...

Send us Fan Mail A virtual tour of six rocky places across the north of England that help us understand exactly what the environment was like around 330 million years ago in the Carboniferous period. The land we now call Britain wasn't 55 degrees north then, we were close to the Equator and our landscape alternated between steamy swamps, coastal lagoons, huge lazy rivers, and even coral seas....

Send us Fan Mail This is the first episode of the first season of these podcasts. They are based on my five books about northern rocks and their connections with our landscape ….and us. The stories of this first season – Time travelling - begin almost 500 million years ago and end with the Roman conquest of the north. Episode one begins deep in a southern ocean ....and on a hill in the Lake Distri...