The North Downs in leafy Surrey are one of the hidden gems of Britain and Ranmore Common, a large tract of woodland west of unfortunately-named Dorking, is one of its lesser known spots, losing all the glory to admittedly glorious Box Hill next door. But this view from the meadow that lies behind the car park on Ranmore Common Road is typical of the kind of vista the North Downs provides in spades. Enjoy the view.


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Tags: Layby, Lay-by

From the people who brought you Layby of the Week. We are proud to announce Pay and Display of the Day* – its urban counterpart.

Today’s entry is the fairly nautical wonder that is Bristol’s Floating Harbour and a view of it from just down the road from St Mary Redcliffe’s Church in Redcliffe Parade car park. Point your pupils at this:


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And if you visit, the Redcliffe Caves are yards away, the church is sublime and Bristol is a beautiful, bustling city.

*Despite the name, they won’t be daily.

Tags: Urban landscapes, Lay-by, Layby

By Loch Eck, to be precise. This five star view, from the beautiful Argyll Forest Park, can be had from one of the most picturesque spots yet revealed to us in our relentless GoogleTrundle around the roads of Britain. It’s not the kind of place you discover by accident on your way to the shops, but if you’re ever in the area, it’s worth at least a thermos of tea and some petticoat tails.


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Tags: Layby, Lay-by

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Staying in Scotland – and not so far from last week’s layby on the A837 to Lochinver – another worthwhile stop-off on the west coast Rock Route designated by Scottish Natural Heritage, the Knockan Crag National Nature Reserve car park, near Elphin on the A835.

The Knockan Crag NNR is amazing. An unmanned visitor centre open all-hours, all-year with information and interactive displays on the landscape and geology of the area and two circular trails for different abilities, a car park and toilets. There are beautiful rock sculptures in the, frankly, prehistoric landscape and glorious views of Loch and Lochans stretching out at your feet. There are plenty of steps, but there's also a wheelchair/pushchair-friendly path to the Rock Room with its hands-on displays and touch-screen computer.

It's all in honour of tectonic forces that were strong enough to weld continents together, create the mountains and slide a huge block of ancient landscape dozens of kilometres over the top of younger rocks. All of that happened at Knockan Crag.

The Rock Room is a short, easy walk from the car park and it comes recommended.

Tags: Lay-by, Layby

After almost two years’ absence, a welcome return to this feature on spotting the scenery with a cup of thermos tea by the roadside sees one of the most impressive, alien landscapes of Britain, around the hummocky plateau of Assynt in the top left-hand corner of Scotland.


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The Lewisian Gneiss here is between two and three billion years old and is all that survives in Britain of our Canadian connection, when this part of Scotland was also part of the ancient nucleus of North America. The policeman’s helmet mountain on the horizon is Suilven, about 4 miles to the south east of this layby and is made of comparatively young (only one billion-year-old) Torridonian sandstone.

Tags: Lay-by, Layby

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If your browser does not support Google Earth’s plug-in, you’re out of luck if you’re waiting for the Google Street car to arrive - this spot is simply too remote. Fortunately, the British Landscape Club have got there before you.

At the head of a remote valley and at the heart of the Snowdonia National Park, this Welsh lake sits at the centre of an eroded away dome - the Harlech Dome - of buckled rock that once bridged Snowdon in the north to Cader Idris in the south.



The lake is fed by the Afon Artro stream, the valley of which provides a mean transport corridor, enough for a hairy single track most of the way up from the village of Llanbedr on the coast road near Harlech. There’s a full account of its wonders in the Club manual, The Lie of the Land by Ian Vince, but all you need to know is that there’s a car park, a portaloo and moments of unfettered wilderness and blissful peace around this amazing spot.

Tags: Lay-by, Layby

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If your browser does not support Google Earth’s plug-in, here’s a real view of Silbury Hill, taken from just down the road by the Google Street Maps car.


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Either way, it’s an impressive structure - Europe’s largest man-made hill, it rivals some Egyptian pyramids in size and was built over successive generations from about 2400 BC. It is located in a landscape of dip and scarp, gently undulating chalk downs occasionally punctuated by imposing escarpments.

The recently synthesized view is that Silbury Hill, successive excavations of which have yielded no burials, was constantly tinkered with by our Neolithic ancestors as a kind of devotional labour, perhaps commemorating their ancestors who laboured for thousands of years building a ritual landscape in and around nearby Avebury, the site of the largest henge in the world - itself a devotional labour of epic proportions.

There’s a layby and viewing area a little to the west on the A4.


A view of a tiny part of the henge at Avebury.


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An aerial view.

Tags: Lay-by, Layby

Today's Layby of the Week comes from the Peak District near the town of Castleton in Derbyshire and, as well as a nice view, it's a rare case of a layby that is caused by the landscape. Originally the A625 wound its way up this slope on its way from Sheffield to Manchester, a less precipitous route than Winnats Pass to the south. But there was a problem: the road was built on an unconsolidated scree of shale that had slumped off Mam Tor during an exceptionally wet period around 4000 years ago - you can still see the cliff on the Tor. Rather than a discreet event, this landslide continues today at a rate of about a quarter of metre (about 10") a year. This movement damned all attempts to repair and reconstruct the road and eventually, in 1979 after two years as a single track carriageway, the A625 was permanently closed to through traffic.


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Mam Tor is also known as the shivering mountain as a result of this instability. What's left of the road is still making its way down the valley.

Tags: Lay-by, Layby

Under the shadow of Wales' highest mountain - Yr Wyddfa, or Mt Snowdon, to give it its colonial name - this beautiful parking spot down the Pass of Llanberis by the Afon Nant Peris stream is on the A4086 between the Youth Hostel at Gorphwysfa and the town of Llanberis.


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These two shots were taken from approximately the same position and look up and down the valley. The rocks around this part of Snowdonia are a complex mix of mud and sandstones with volcanic tuff (ash) and all manner of igneous intrusions formed from magma cooled slowly underground.

Tags: Lay-by, Layby

A special lay-by of the week this week from Bolderwood in the New Forest; not so much a lay-by as an interesting place to park, courtesy of the Forestry Commission.


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Ordnance Survey 1 Inch New Popular Edition 1945

During the summer months, the wildly interesting information kiosk (run-of-the-mill town centre TICs please take note) is open and on a busy weekend when the weather is nice you will often find an ice cream van parked up. But all of that is moot, because a short walk from the car park is a deer viewing platform - from where you may be lucky enough to spot a Red Stag or a group of Roe Bucks - like the picture below.



It’s also a timely reminder, as autumn passes into winter, of the importance of trees in the landscape, both from an aesthetic and functional view. Our forests are rich habitats that, like all woodland the world over, need to be managed and preserved not only for the good of some abstract ecological notion, but also because indiscriminate felling or management of them for anything other than their natural value is madness. The Coalition Government has recently announced it is to sell off up to half of our national forests. Not only would this put habitats and wildlife in severe danger, but it wouldn’t even raise very much money - making it all look less like a response to a financial crisis and more like an ideologically-sponsored privatisation; less like selling the family silver, more like putting our back garden up for sale. Anyone who cares about our landscape is strongly urged to join over 35,000 signatories (in the first week alone) and sign the 38 Degrees petition now - maybe they’ll think again when they see the numbers.

Tags: Lay-by, Layby

This time last week I was preparing for my talk at the Manor House Museum in Ilkley on the Yorkshire Beneath Their Feet. It was a glorious evening - coming in from the hotel in the neighbouring village of Ben Rhydding, sunset turned the sky the colour of orange juice. The talk went well - a nice crowd of 40 or so - and I was feeling upbeat as I headed back to my hotel - the next day I was due to lead a party around a local tourist hotspot, the Cow and Calf Rocks, which loom over the town like a thunder cloud.

Overnight, a thick fog descended, but 35 people dutifully turned up to follow me around the Cow and Calf anyway, despite visibility beyond the end of one’s arms becoming difficult, so this week’s lay-by of the week is dedicated to the helpful folk of Ilkley and its environs.


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NB, For aesthetic reasons, the Googlecar is a little below the Cow and Calf car park in this shot.

Tags: Lay-by, Layby

This week’s scenic parking - of Loch Lubnaig, near Callander - is provided by BLC member Ken.

“When you drive up out of the central belt, climb up into the hills and drive alongside the loch here you just have to pull in at the parking / picnic spot, and take a good long look at the loch. The water can go glassy flat and reflects like a mirror. Terrific.”


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Tags: Lay-by, Layby

A spectacular view over Porlock Bay is the first of two fantastic vistas from the Exmoor coast of Somerset. This car park is just west of Selworthy Beacon at the end of a very long no-through road from Minehead. Not on the way to anywhere at all, but well worth a special trip.


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If you’re driving on the A39, the road that connects the main towns of North Somerset and Devon, chances are you’re not getting anywhere very fast, so why not relax and make a detour to the village of Selworthy. This is the church car park in the village - rotate the panorama a little for a view of Selworthy’s beautiful white church.


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Tags: Lay-by, Layby

This is a view down Loch Ness and the Great Glen from the A82 a few miles to the south west of Inverness. The Great Glen is Britain’s most remarkable fault line, running die-straight from the north east to the south west across Scotland. But there’s far more to it than that.


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The fault is a tear fault - the landscape to the north moved around 80 miles south-west then, in a second phase millions of years later, 18 miles back in the opposite direction. Loch Ness - which is, on average, around 600 feet deep owes its formation to the fault: glaciers carved out the trench from the band of shattered and pulverised rock left by it.

There is also strong evidence which links it to the Cabot Fault, which runs the length of the north west coast of Newfoundland and into the Gulf of St Lawrence. When the faults were formed, over 400 million years ago and long before the Atlantic Ocean formed, Scotland was part of the same landmass as Canada.


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Tags: Lay-by, Layby

Having gone to the foot of a gorge last week, we’re on the top of something similar - and we’re still on the Carboniferous limestone, only on the other side of the Bristol Channel. We’re at Symonds Yat Rock.



Again, it’s not, strictly speaking, a lay-by - more of a car park that leads to a view - but it’s only a very short walk and thousands come every year to see the view up and down the River Wye. It’s home also to Peregrine Falcons, Buzzards and Goshawks and is well worth the detour. It also makes an excellent place to watch the stars at night, according to some.

No Google Street View this time, but an OpenStreetMap image.


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Tags: Lay-by, Layby

Not just a lay-by, but a series of parking spots running down Cliff Road in Cheddar Gorge from which to admire arguably the most beautiful gorge in Britain. And the further down the gorge you go, the more sublime the view.


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The gorge was carved out in periglacial conditions during the recent glaciations of the current Ice Age. Though too far south to have had glaciers, water in the limestone from which the gorge walls are made, froze and rendered the normally permeable rock impermeable. Meltwater floods in the summer months flowed over the limestone and cut a deep channel which is the gorge we see today.

Tags: Lay-by, Layby

An extra lay-by of the week, found completely by chance while looking for something else. These hills in the Southern Uplands of the Scottish Borders were made by the bulldozing of sediments on an ancient ocean floor when England and Wales - carried on the back of a micro-continent called Avalonia - joined to Scotland (which was still attached to Greenland) over 400 million years ago.


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The lay-by, meanwhile has just about anything you could desire, including a café, phone box, tourist information panel and fantastic views over St Mary’s Loch and it’s southern neighbour, the Loch of the Lowes. Looks like a charming spot. We’d give it a 4.5/5 Thermos rating, but there’s no need to bring one.

Tags: Lay-by, Layby

Back to our normal format next week on the nation’s A-rated, A-road Thermos stops, but I’ve taken the liberty of designating a number of trains in the South west of England as personal lay-bys and attempted to take pictures. They are variable in quality - some trains just seem to be smeared with a veneer of fly corpses, sea splatter and dirty rain. Sometimes polarising the sky for a nice effect also brings out the rectilinear strip light reflections that head off towards our destination, which is an effect I don’t mind too much.

The trains I travelled on were the Great Western 125 mph from Totnes to Exeter and the more modern but 90 mph from Exeter to Salisbury. On my way to Exeter, I was hoping to catch a good view of the fantastic New Red Sandstone cliffs around Dawlish, as featured in The Lie of the Land. I got something of it, through the fly carcasses, and it looks like an old double-exposed holiday slide that has been wedged under a shelf in the garage since the 1970s. It was, at least, nice to make something that came with an instant patina of age on a digital camera.

 
 

The second two shots are nearer Exeter, of clumps of trees on the Exminster Marshes. By the time that I had got on a cleaner train, I took some more presentable shots of the kind of thing you see from trains, this time mostly between Exeter and Yeovil. This first shot is of some trees in the Axe Valley - I’m hopeless at trees, but they’re in the right environment for Alder and Willow. I like the way they’re all leaning here, as if in agreement with one another.



The second shot is quite near Yeovil. The reflections from the train’s internal lighting give the sky some go-faster stripes.

Tags: Lay-by, Layby

Bit of a diversion off the A-roads of rural Britain this week into an old mobile library van parked close to an urban A-road or two: the ROAM London project.


ROAM at Hollow Ponds, Whipps Cross Road

ROAM is touring the five Olympic boroughs of London over the next three weeks as a peripatetic arts space, a mobile reading room and a venue for talks and performance. It has its own reference library and comes complete with a proper parquet floor. It’s the idea of Caught By The River’s Robin Turner and fits well with that website’s general ethos of taking solace in easy, idle pursuits and looking for the rural within our urban lives.

I’ve already had the pleasure of taking the message of the British Landscape Club there and chatting about the Britain beneath its wheels and I’ll be doing it again three more times over the next week and a half, so come and join me.

Friday 9 July 3pm *NOTE NEW TIME*
Beneath Our Feet: Three Billion Years an Hour Through Britain’s Past
ROAM London: Haggerston Park • Parked up behind the tennis courts • E2 8NP

Friday 16 July 7.00pm
Beneath Our Feet: Three Billion Years an Hour Through Britain’s Past
ROAM London: Mile End Park • Grove Road • E3
*NOTE NEW VENUE* (Was at Truman Brewery)

Monday 19 July 7.30pm
Beneath Our Feet: Three Billion Years an Hour Through Britain’s Past
ROAM London: Oxleas Woods • Shooters Hill • SE18 3JA

Tags: Lay-by, Layby

What with the melée of tat and counterfeit Cornishness down the road at Lands End, Cape Cornwall doesn’t have to do much to impress, but it is very much the real thing, a wild spot in an increasingly crowded county. It is - separatist views notwithstanding - the only headland named as a cape in England or Wales (and, by a process of elimination, Cornwall) and is vastly superior to its commercial counterpart down the coast. Indeed, until 1801, when the Ordnance Survey came along, it was assumed to be the most westerly point in Britain, a runner-up status that has at least shielded it from the kind of unwanted attention that is focussed upon Lands End.

The text book definition of a cape, by the way, is a promontory where two major bodies of water meet - in this case the Atlantic and St George's Channel. Since those nineteenth century OS men declared Lands End as further out in the ocean it is arguably where the waters meet rather than Cape Cornwall, but the name stuck anyway.


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Meanwhile, there’s no such controversy about Lizard Point, mainland Britain’s most southerly spot. There’s a National Trust car park there as well and a bonus collection of sheds that sell souvenirs carved from the local rock. This rock, serpentine, is metamorphic in origin, 400 million years or so old, and an excellent example of a bit of oceanic crust that has unaccountably slid over the top of a piece of continent (it almost always slides under when the two collide).



You might like a cup of tea, while you contemplate that and, besides one of the souvenir sheds, lies the cafe with the best view in all of Cornwall (below). It’s always busy in the season and it’s always worth the wait. You may even be fortunate enough to see a couple of Cornish Choughs wheeling in the sky, failing that you can stare at the cliff that rings with the sound of Jackdaws and Kittiwake and hope to catch a glimpse of a Peregrine or two.


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Tags: Lay-by, Layby

This week I can tie three loose ends and write not only about lay-bys, but also the Dorset landscape and the road trip that triggered me into writing The Lie of the Land in the first place.


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One bright and crisp winters day a short breath after Christmas, we were driving through Dorset as we made our way back from Cornwall. The journey was quite familiar to me and I had never given it much thought. A couple of years before, I had come the closest to thinking deeply about travel when two friends and I covered the same ground as part of an epic, 15 mph journey across England in an electric milk float but, crucially we had picked a different route for this stretch.

I was on the A35, a murderously busy road we had escaped from while on the float - a quick turn-off that happened to land us in Arcadia, an enchanted valley near Little Bredy trapped somewhere between dusk and the early 1950s. It was the encapsulation of pastoral beauty and I will remember the scene for ever.



As so often happens in Britain though, by catching one thing, you miss another and the A35 - for all its homicidal ways - is the scene of something on a par with our Dorset Arcadia but in a different way. The stretch of it we avoided, between Dorchester and Bridport, affords awe-inspiring views of the lumpy, bumpy Dorsetshire hills, the festival of buxom hummocks that made it into the introduction to The Lie of the Land.



As ever, all attempts to capture such grandeur on a soul-less semiconductor fail miserably. I’ve taken my version of the Google Street View, but the best stuff is on the other side of the road when the road reaches its height and the views over the Dorset coast are breathtaking. You really have to see the view for yourself.

Tags: Lay-by, Layby, Lie of the Land

This week the BLC gets out of the car and goes for a short stroll up a magnificent hill in Hampshire.


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Danebury is a magnificent Iron Age hillfort a few miles north of Stockbridge. There are two car-parks, the lower of which is clearly visible from the Google Street View car, but visitors can make their way further up the drive to a second parking area partially under the cover of trees. It’s then a short, moderately stretching walk (we did it with an off-roading pram, its occupant and an additional toddler on a hot day, so it obviously isn’t that difficult) up the hill to a large complex of banks and ditches. The outer banks are now topped by beech trees and surround a village-size area of almost level ground, perfect for kite flying and exploration.

The view from the Ordnance Survey trig point is amazing and well worth the walk up the hill.

Tags: Lay-by, Layby

Here’s another one contributed by SteveP in the BLC Forum. Apparently he has his lunch here occasionally and we couldn’t imagine a better view.


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Steve writes, "Between Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch and Menai Bridge there are two lay-bys. One is bigger and better than the other in my opinion. It sports views of many of the mountains of north wales (Carneddau, Glyders, Snowdon range [though not Snowdon itself I believe]), also the Menai Strait where you can see kayakers and little boats and the bridge built by Telford that gives the town Menai Bridge it's English name (it's called Borth in Welsh)."

Tags: Lay-by, Layby

This week, we look at two extraordinary views to down the contents of a Thermos to and, while both are in Scotland, it would be hard to find two locations in the country that were any further apart.


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The first is right at the top, on the north coast of Scotland at Heilam above the shores of Loch Eriboll, gazing from the top of one of the most violent upheavals in these islands’ prehistory - when huge blocks of crust were uplifted and pushed dozens of miles from the east. The peaceful view is that of the ‘foreland’ - the block that escaped all the pandemonium.

Far to the south on the Mull of Galloway - Scotland’s most southerly point - a road down the long peninsula leads to a car park with panoramic views of land and sea.


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Tags: Lay-by, Layby

This view of Burgh Island off the South Devon coast at Bigbury-on-Sea, just east of Plymouth, is not really from a lay-by as such, but is similar to the view of the island that you can get from the beach car park 100 yards down the hill. So don’t park here unless you want your car plastered in stickers decorated with yellow chevrons or you wish to recover it from the over-sized palms and bolt-era technology of a licensed gang of vagabonds.

We’ve used this location because it’s a great view of Burgh Island, the Art Deco hotel that everyone from Agatha Christie, through Churchill and the Beatles have stayed at and the magnificent sand spit that connects it to the island. Caused by the refraction of waves around the island, this particular spit is a classic example of a tombolo.


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In Shetland, tombolos are known by their Norse word, ayre. At the romantically named Ayre of Swinister, two tombolos enclose a coastal peat lagoon known as the Houb.


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Tags: Lay-by, Layby

Almost at the end of the old road to the Kylesku-Kylestrome ferry that once took all the traffic of the A894 west coast road, this lay-by would have once given you something fantastic to look at while you were waiting for the boat to arrive.

The view is of Loch Glendhu stretching off into the distance while Loch Glencoul forks, unseen, behind the nearest headland to the right. The die-straight diagonal line on the mountain behind the lamp-post is the fault plane of the Glencoul Thrust, one of a number of landscape movements caused by the joining of Scotland - originally part of the same landmass as North America - to the rest of Britain over 400 million years ago. Land was folded, fractured then heaved dozens of miles from the west, from the north at Durness all the way down the west coast to the Isle of Skye.



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Although the ferry no longer carries traffic across the Loch to Kylestrome, there are still boat trips from Kylesku - most notably up Loch Glencoul, from where you can enjoy superb views of Eas a’ Chùall Aluinn, at 658 feet, Britain’s highest waterfall.

Tags: Lay-by, Layby

Lay-by of the week makes a much welcome return to the BLC website with this stunning vista of the Chesil Beach from the Isle of Portland. The prospect is so gorgeous and sublime it reminds us of aerial views, but we’ve had to cheat here a bit as the Google Car is parked on top of road markings that read “Private Access No Waiting”, so definitely not a lay-by as such.



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You can get an even better view from the New Ground car park - follow the big arrow on the Street View below - but the Google car driver neglected to have their sandwiches in the lay-by that day.


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Tags: Lay-by, Layby

When the Highland Council made the A838, in the far north-west of Scotland, wider in 1991, a number of cuttings were made to accommodate the new carriageway, one of which has now become the site of the most fascinating lay-by in the country.

So, another week, another lay-by, but this isn't any normal picturesque view but one which labours under the name of the Multi-Coloured Rock Stop. Some might find the joviality annoying but arguments about the presentation of science aside, the Multi-Coloured Rock Stop is an astounding feature. Three different ages of rock can be distinguished on the cutting opposite this layby and even the artefacts left behind by the road contractor's rock drills, the regular parallel incisions down the rock face, only add to the effect.


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The oldest rock here - the pale grey one - is one of the ancient Lewisian Gneisses of the North West Highlands, a rock that was brewed at high temperatures and under great pressure miles underground billions of years ago. Swirling across it with the twisted teardrop freedom of a Paisley pattern, is a dark brown-black basalt which, as molten rock, squeezed through a weakness in the gneiss. Finally, streaks of pink granite cut through both the gneiss and the basalt dyke and so must be the youngest of all three.

Tags: Lay-by, Layby