I hear the stones lament them: Deep they delved us, fair they wrought us, high they builded us; but they are gone. They are gone. – Tolkein
They are indeed gone, those people who studded England with standing stones. Some 4,500 years ago, human beings dragged oblongs of Jurassic limestone to the top of this Cotswolds ridge to form a ceremonial circle. And there the stones still stand – watching the sunset, watching a thousand generations come and go.
The voices of the people who placed the Rollright stones are lost. But rocks themselves speak, loudly and often.
They whisper of water: Rottingdean’s cliffs – like all of England’s chalk landscapes – were laid down under shallow seas swum by monstrous reptiles.
They whisper of fire: the green powdery horizontal line in the centre of this photograph is volcanic ash, thought to come from an extinct volcano under what is now Cheltenham.
They whisper of waves: fossilised as ripples in the rocks at Wrens Nest National Nature Reserve in Dudley.
And mostly, they talk of ice. The icesheets that crushed, squeezed and reorganised this island have left staggeringly blunt fingerprints, from the bizarre pingo ponds of East Anglia to the sobering ‘ghost waterfall’ of Malham Cove. Dry today, it would have been a roaring torrent to rival Niagara when the Yorkshire Dales were in the Pleistocene’s grip.
But geology is the present as well as the past. It is impossible to understand living nature without reading the rocks on which it walks. Those rocks feed soils, control pH levels, guide rivers, throw shade and offer nesting sites. They dictate whether a landscape becomes a wildflower meadow or a blanket bog.
We should listen to them more.
A Walk with Wildlife 
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