Awesome Weekends (Scotland)

Last weekend, I met-up with a geology friend, who's also in Europe this year, in Edinburgh to take a pilgrimage to Siccar Point, which is the location where Scottish geologist James Hutton discovered the concept of deep time in 1787.
Here's a brief summary of our Scottish adventures:
We started out in Edinburgh, which was a pretty amazing city, although it was a little disorienting that people drove on the other side of the street.

We stayed in a really nice bed and breakfast, and we planned to head to Siccar Point early Saturday morning.

Here's the b&b.

We planned on taking a bus to Cockburnspath, which is a small town near Siccar Point. On Saturday morning, though, we ended up taking a city bus to the opposite side of town than the bus station, and decided to walk and enjoy downtown Edinburgh.

However, downtown Edinburgh is a very distracting place for a geologist, since there are a lot of interesting rocks, like this deformed basalt that the Edinburgh castle is built on.
We also found this really fascinating rock that is basalt clasts in an organic limestone.
This is a picture of some snails crawling on the fossilized remain of their ancestors.
Anyway, we decided to look for more of the really cool conglomerate-limestone, so we went up the hill by the castle.


We didn't find any more of that really fascinating rock, but there was a great view of the city.
Our little side trip made us miss the early buses to Cockburnspath, though, so we ended up leaving Edinburgh at 3 and getting to Cockburnspath at 4.
When we got to Cockburnspath, we oriented ourselves, and set out to find Siccar Point and Hutton's Unconformity.

Scottish countryside:

We can tell we're getting close because there's gently-dipping Old Red Sandstone:
And... Siccar Point!
Siccar Point is the second piece of land jutting out into the North Sea.

Yep, we made it to Siccar Point.

More Siccar Point.

However, it was a little more challenging to get to Hutton's Unconformity.

We went down a hill-side covered with ferns. Walking through ferns was a very strange sensation and felt a little surreal.

Then we walked around the beach on the Old Red Sandstone and the conglomerate layer, which directly overlays the Silurian greywacke at the unconformity.
However, it eventually became clear that we were on the wrong side of the point to see Hutton's Unconformity, and the sun was setting and the tide was coming in.
So we decided to climb back up to the top of the point. Unfortunately, when we got there, it was dark, and we couldn't go looking for Hutton's Unconformity any more that day. We walked back to Cockburnspath and took a taxi to Dunbar, with plans to return to Siccar Point the next day.
After a night in a very expensive b&b in Dunbar, we tried to call a taxi to get back to Siccar Point with no luck: taxis don't run on Sunday morning. So we spent the morning in Dunbar and took a bus back to Edinburgh so my friend could catch her flight.

Trying to call the taxi.

The oldest Methodist church in Scotland.

The birthplace of John Muir.

Cool braided stream patterns on the beach.

After my friend left, I had some time to kill in Edinburgh, and I went to a really cool museum (the Dynamic Earth Museum). I found it really well put together, and they had really good exhibits, including real glacial ice and the rocks of Scotland. In the whole museum, which took a good hour and a half to walk through, there was only 1 thing I disagreed with (they said that the subducting slab melts, which causes arc volcanism).
They also had the most original geologic cross-section I've ever seen. It's called "A Slice through Scotland" and shows the major faults as different sections of rock and has real rock for the different Scottish rocks.

I also found this on my way to the museum:
On Sunday night, I found a small Methodist church, and the people were really friendly and had coffee fellowship, so it felt a lot like home.

I left Monday morning (Monday was a national holiday in Spain, so I had the day off), and took some nice pictures of the Salisbury Craigs in the sunrise.
So, even though we failed to find Hutton's Unconformity, we still found some great rocks and had a wonderful time in Scotland, and the trip was definitely worthwhile. There may be plans for a return trip sometime this winter too.