Park
Holyrood Park
Extinct volcano and crags cradling wildflower moorland, lochs and grazing swans above the city.
0:00≈ 2 min
Location
0:00≈ 2 min
About this audio guide
This guide to Holyrood Park in Edinburgh follows James Hutton, a farmer turned geologist who in the late 1780s knelt on Salisbury Crags and traced a dark streak of rock cutting through pale sandstone. Almost everyone around him believed the Earth was a few thousand years old, shaped by a single flood, but what Hutton felt in that rock unsettled that idea. The dark rock is dolerite, once molten and forced up through the older sandstone before cooling solid underground.
This audio guide was created using AI.