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The Highlands Controversy: Constructing Geological Knowledge through Fieldwork in Nineteenth-Century Britain (Science and Its Conceptual Foundations series)

by David R. Oldroyd

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Nick Simpson said: " Anyone clicking on this review will, like me, be motivated by an interest in the geology of the NW Highlands. If you have the patience to get through it, Prof Oldroyd's tome will be a satisfying read.

For the uninitiated, the subject is the period in Anyone clicking on this review will, like me, be motivated by an interest in the geology of the NW Highlands. If you have the patience to get through it, Prof Oldroyd's tome will be a satisfying read.

For the uninitiated, the subject is the period in the mid-late 19th century when the officials of the state-funded Geological Survey were close to providing a plausible account of Britain's rocks. The Big Beast was Roderick Murchison, with his Mini-Me sidekick Archibald Geikie in tow. Murchison dominated the intellectual landscape, and his reading of the landscape of the far north became the unchallenged norm. Prof Oldroyd doesn't just set out the intellectual battlelines between the Survey chiefs and the "amateurs" outside, but also accounts for social and professional motivations (jobs, career, glory) which led these scientists to behave the way they did.

For in time Murchison and Geikie were challenged by James Nicol, an Aberdeen academic, and Charles Lapworth, an English schoolteacher. Nicol died before he could be vindicated, but Lapworth lived to see the Survey view overturned. Essentially, Murchison had spent insufficient time walking the (exceptionally arduous) ground; he and his fellows did not have the intellectual tools which would have made diagnosis easier. They did not understand that rocks are malleable things under sufficient pressure; they knew about vertical faults, but had no notion that rock formations could be pushed sideways for many miles by the forces of mountain building, driven in turn by plate tectonics.

For the NW highlands was one of the first areas studied in detail where lateral thrust faults built the landscape, and it was an appreciation of the enormous forces required which led in the decades that followed to the notion of continental plates drifting and banging into each other, making oceans, earthquakes and mountains.

I've read other books on this subject, but Oldroyd's is by far the most thorough. He has read all the surviving papers so we don't have to. It's not a journalist's book, which is to its credit, but it's well-enough written to transcend its academic origins. Anyone interest in the subject should give it a go. ...more "

Jan 02, 2026 06:26AM · see review