Where There's a Will There's a Way

The weekend seems to have gone very quickly and I'm back at the office on a very contrasting day to yesterday. The wall to wall blue sky has been replaced by wall to wall greyness. I went for a run at lunchtime into Shipley Glen and marvelled at how the trees have found a roothold in the crags. I guess they get a little helping start in these lines of weakness, away from the foraging animals of the woods. This birch was the most dramatic example. The roots must go right through the rock and well into the ground below. It still seems utterly improbable, though, that life can exploit the most unlikely of niches in this way. The will to survive is extraordinary throughout the entire natural world.

I got to thinking that even the most seemingly static elements of our landscape are actually dynamic. It's just that in this instance the timescale of the change is over years. A time-lapse sequence over that period would be truly extraordinary to watch, to see a little seedling grow and literally incorporate itself into this gritstone. And, of course, it doesn't stop there. Over a scale of millions of years we would be able to witness the geological processes which have created these rocks, laid down as a sequence of alluvial deposits by ancient rivers over 300 million years ago. Each element of the stratification must correspond to a different kind of climate, an alteration in sea level and a change in the nature of what was probably a massive river delta. It's all quite humbling really. And that's possibly a good thing!