Walking the Whin Sill

We learned about The Whin Sill in school geography lessons, when we were coming to terms with the mind-boggling notion of fluid rock. Back then it bore the epithet 'Great' and for us Londoners it was a reinforcement of everything we were taught to believe about the north of England; a gritty, faraway wildnerness that spawned gritty, uncompromising peoples. These days I travel south to get to that not-so-faraway country. The wilderness has become familiar, although no less awe-inspiring. And the people? Well I guess they are the melting pot of humanity I have come to expect wherever I go, uncompromising only in their refusal to be stereotyped.

Irresistible force meets immovable object. The Tees finds a
weak point in the Sill at Cauldron Snout

Wherever it breaks the surface The Whin Sill makes for exciting scenery. My geography teacher was accurate in introducing us to it as one of the dominant and defining features of the landscape of northern England. From the Farne Islands in the east to the sudden Pennine escarpment in the west, it crops up in many of the region's most celebrated natural wonders. The river Tees hurtles over its ledges in a series of thunderous cataracts at High Force, Low Force and Cauldron Snout. It forms vertical, castellated cliffs at Holwick Scar and Falcon Clints and provides the setting for a geography master's dream, the near perfect glaciated valley of High Cup Nick. It delighted the Romans too; they built their famous wall along its ramparts at Hotbanks and Cuddy's Crags.

Made of a tough, dark igneous rock called dolerite, The Whin Sill was intruded into the horizontal strata of the surrounding bedrock some 295 million years ago, during a period of tectonic stretching. Wherever there was a gap the 1000 degree magma poured in like hot wax, bubbling up through a vent from unimaginable depths. Because it was not laid down on the surface in sediments but forced entry later, the Sill is not uniform, as generations of quarrymen and drillers have discovered. In some places it is hardly there at all, in others it may extend to a thickness of sixty or seventy metres.

Textbook dream. The Whin Sill forms a perfect band around
the glaciated High Cup Nick

It was quarrymen, in fact, who in the nineteenth century gave the Whin Sill its name. Whinstone is a local term for the rock which makes first rate road stone but which is generally thought too hard to fashion into blocks for house building. They called it a sill because it lies horizontally. It was therefore the original sill, before the term was coined for more general use by geologists. The typical columnar forms of the whinstone crags are a consequence of the magma cooling and fracturing along the vertical plane. Whinstone quarries are very much in evidence in this part of the country although many of them, like the mineral mines, are now thoroughly worked out. It is stll referred to as the 'Great' Whin Sill in some places, to distinguish it from the lesser 'Little Whin Sill' to be found outcropping in parts of Weardale.

The Whin Sill exposed: fracture columns of dolerite at
Holwick Scar, Teesdale

It's hard to be blind to the geology in this part of the land and, with an accustomed eye, it is possible to discern some remarkable shifts in the curves of the landscape, the pH of the soil and the flora over the length of a leisurely walk. One could hardly expect an event as cataclysmic as that creating the Whin Sill to leave the surrounding country rock unaffected. Above Cauldron Snout, superheating of the overlying limestone has altered its crystalline structure to produce an alkaline granular rock known rather wonderfully as 'sugar limestone'. I don't recall learning about that in Surrey school geography classes. Perhaps it didn't quite resonate with the craggy northern image my teachers were so keen to depict. Anyway, sugar limestone is home to some uncommon alpine plants like the beautiful blue Spring Gentian. Sadly there were none to be found on my last visit to the Cow Green Reservoir, which sounds like the perfect reason for going back.

The whole truth

'Facilius per partes in cognitionem totius adducimur'
Seneca the Younger (4BC to AD65) from Epistulae morales

I remember my early science classes at school. I don't think at that age we had split them into their separate disciplines. Sometimes, when the season was right, we would collect wild flowers from the school grounds and take them inside and dismantle them to learn about their constituent parts. Buttercups were a favourite; they were cheerful and simple and in plentiful supply. Looking back, I don't recall any qualms about us picking them, no cautionary lessons about sparing their less common brothers and sisters. There were words that hadn't been invented in those days, like 'ecosystem' and 'biodiversity'. Eden was there to be reaped, and raped.

Anyway, with nimble fingers and tweezers we pulled apart our chosen flower, laying out the fragments on a blank page. A tiny dab of glue was a precaution against sudden sneezes and boisterous classmates. Once we had our design just the way we wanted, a yellow and green five-pointed star, we would annotate it in pencil. Stipe and stigma, stamens and sepals, the alliterative words rang at once clinical and musical, equally at home in the poem and the operating theatre. When we were done the whole thing was covered in a square of transparent 'sticky-back plastic' (a phrase forever linked in my mind with Valerie Singleton, John Noakes et al). And there they were, our dissected flowers preserved for always, or at least until we grew tired of our no-longer-new exercise books and lost them.

It was a harmless enough lesson I suppose, but even at a young age I remember a certain disquiet about it. There was something a little unseemly about the end result, something not entirely edifying about dismantling a private thing of beauty and splaying it in this way. I must be careful here; with my adult sensibilities I can add connotations of sexual violation to what we were doing of which I am sure to have been innocent at the time. So what was it exactly, this undefined uneasiness? Disappointment, I think, and sadness. It is like the feeling I get in provincial museums and private collections looking at trays of displayed moths and butterflies. Musty and mouldering, they signify age suspended, a chimera of everlasting beauty. Drop the tray and these little pinned-out Dorian Grays will disintegrate into dust.

Our exercise, intended to reveal, had merely exposed. The flat page showed us what but not why. We learned nothing of how our specimens aligned themselves to the rays of the sun, or how they opened to the insect vectors of their choice, why they grew abundantly here but not there, why they flowered in June but not April, why they were golden yellow and not blue or white. Our neat two-dimensional creations had anatomy but lacked vitality; stems and stamens yes, but no soul.

The quotation above, written by Seneca in a letter at the end of his long life, translates as 'We are more easily led part by part to an understanding of the whole.' This linear and very Latin approach to learning has been enshrined in our education system ever since. We break things down, take them one step at a time, allow time for assimilation before moving on. But it is a method not without fault. A compartmentalised approach to learning can easily accentuate the differences between things rather than the commonalities. It spills over into other aspects of our society, leading to linear cause-and-effect responses to probelm solving. Our piecemeal approaches to clinical medicine and law-making are examples, they are rarely holistic. It seems we can never entirely put Humpty together again.

My disappointment with my buttercup was, I suppose, a first lesson in Gestalt; the whole is not merely the sum of its parts, an aphorism attributed with some dispute to Aristotle's Metaphysica. It has become fashionable to disparage the grand old philosopher in our iconoclastic age but his explorations of the origin and essence of things, of primal existence, have illumined our view of ourselves in a way that is unparalleled in Western thought.

Later I went on to study natural sciences at college, at times conducting laboratory exercises far more brutal and pointless than dismembering buttercups. And often I was left with that same elusive unease that we were missing something. We found out what things were made of but not what made them the way they are.

I have some of my school exercise books still, those jottings of another me. None contains a flower preserved under plastic I'm pleased to say. These days I prefer to wade knee-high through buttercup fields, relishing how radiant they are in their wholeness.