Perched Granite Boulder, Lands-end, UK
During a recent holiday on the
Pernwith peninsula (near Land’s End in Cornwall, England) I took a set of
photographs of the coastal scenery and rock. These photographs can be seen in this Facebook album. For comparison I
have also added some photos I took in 2006 on Bodmin Moor. (Also in Cornwall)
Both Bodmin moor and the Penwith
peninsula are the eroded remains of huge granitic intrusions. Granite is melted
and re-solidified Earth’s crust, although the exact mechanisms of both the
intrusion and the subsequent production of exfoliation joints in the granite by
erosion is still the subject of academic debate according to this wiki article.
Whenever I’m confronted with
scenes of cliffs, valley’s and rock pinnacles such as we see at Penwith, the
deep time needed to generate this “rock of ages” landscape feels very real.
In this particular connection crustal melting caused by plate collisions that
built mountains was followed by the slow cooling of rock deep underground. This
slow cooling is evidenced by the large crystals of Penwith’s coarse grained
granite. (See the large white feldspar crystals in one of my photos). All this
was followed by an extremely slow process of grain by grain erosion. In fact
when one beholds a rock pinnacle of granite and imagines that it was once underground
and surrounded by an extensive apron of extremely hard igneous rock one senses
that the length of time needed to leave this isolated outlier must be immerse,
let alone first erode the mountain of rock above it.
As far as Cornwall is concerned
both Bodmin Moor and the Penwith peninsula have the greatest concentration of
Neolithic and Bronze Age stone monuments. This may be simply because these granite landscapes
provided a ready supply of very durable stone. Or, and this is a speculation,
did these ancient people, seeing the marvellous rock formations around them
desire to ape whatever agency they believed created them? We have, of course, no idea what these prehistoric
communities believed about a cosmos whose workings on the grand-scale was
utterly mysterious to them. Extrapolating from what we know today of preliterate
societies it is quite likely that prehistoric communities understood their
surroundings in terms of the operation of background sentience. To them, therefore, the
landscape was full of awareness and sacredness. Today, however, with our
mechanical paradigm, we understand how insentient processes have generated these
remarkable forms; we see these processes as being utterly unaware of us and
themselves, with no power of empathy; in effect they are psychopathic! No
surprise, then, that an atheist, when he saw the frightening and awesome
spectacle of the recent meteor entering the atmosphere over Russia, should say
“Nature doesn't care about us!”
Today we have to dig a bit
deeper, quite a bit deeper in fact, before we find sacredness. But then we know
a lot more than those simple Neolithic societies; a lot, lot more. So where we
lose we also gain. We know today that conscious sentience is not to be found at
the low level of the bit, byte, particle, or boulder but at the high level of the grand organization of the world .
(See also here)
The Cheesewring, Bodmin Moor, UK. Perched pillows of granite.
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