Holyrood Park

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.