The Unconformity

Imagine a whisky blended to celebrate the famous 18th-century Scottish geologist James Hutton and you might ask why? We would say, because, when we came across his paper the ‘Theory of the Earth; or an Investigation of the Laws Observable in the Composition, Dissolution and Restoration of Land upon the Globe’ we knew how important it was and that it needed bringing to a wider public.

Imagine the bewigged scholar in 1785 lecturing to the Royal Academy that the universe was very different from the Biblical cosmos: one formed by a continuous cycle in which rocks and soil are washed into the sea, compacted into bedrock, forced up to the surface by volcanic processes, and eventually worn away into sediment once again. “The result, therefore, of this physical enquiry,” Hutton concluded, “is that we find no vestige of a beginning, no prospect of an end.”

This gentleman, Lowland farmer and academic, now universally acknowledged as the father of modern geology, identified an ‘Unconformity’ as where a junction between two types of rock formations is visible. His first clear siting of this was very close to our Reiver’s Distillery in the Scottish Borders and formed much of the base of his further works.