PANEL 2    The Ceaseless Sea

In the beginning was the sea. Hundreds of millions of years ago, when the Earth was very young and vast primordial landmasses rose and were submerged, what would become Scotland was unrecognisable. Different parts of our familiar and beloved geography lay far distant from each other, some were attached to huge continents, some were splintered fragments, still others lay submerged on the bed of an ancient ocean. Lying between three palaeo-continents, Laurentia, Baltica and Avalonia, the great expanse of the Iapetus Ocean was beginning to shrink as tectonic movement shaped and reshaped the crust of the Earth. An unimaginably long time ago, about 410 million years, much of what became Scotland was waiting to rise out of the prehistoric seas and be welded together into one of the most geologically distinct places on our planet. Scotland was to be the deposit of a series of ancient collisions. And, throughout our prehistory and in more modern times, these collisions would remain central to an understanding of our nation and its people. Our history is written in our rocks just as surely as it is in monastic chronicles, census returns or the stones and bones of archaeological digs.

 

Panels stitched by:

Helen Nairn

Frances MacLean

Debbie Muir

Nino Stewart

Marjorie Watters

Stitched in:

Kinlochmoidart