Along with several colleagues from UF IFAS Extension, I had the opportunity to attend the Association for International Agricultural and Extension Education (AIAEE) Conference in Scotland last week. While our meetings were in the Highlands city of Inverness, I was able to spend a few days in Edinburgh, adjusting to the time change and exploring.

The tale of King Arthur goes back for centuries—a cultural touchstone from a fictional history written in the 12^th century that has inspired books, movies, and animation up to the modern day. But in Edinburgh sits a monument much older than the legend it’s named for. At 251 m (823 ft) tall, Arthur’s Seat is a geological landform visible from almost anywhere in the city. Formed by a volcano more than 300 million years ago, the igneous rock protrudes dramatically from the surface. Local lore says that the base of Arthur’s Seat was the location of the mythical castle Camelot.

The city’s most striking landmark, the very real Edinburgh Castle (circa 1103), sits atop gigantic Castle Rock, which was formed during the same period of volcanic activity.

Hiking to the top of Arthur’s Seat last week, I noted defined  zones of vegetation. At the base of the hill and in the valley were healthy tufts of deep green grasses. Above them and nearly to the top were dense, thorny stands of beautiful yellow-blooming shrubs called gorse. This plant is native to the British Isles and western Europe, but invasive in many places around the rest of the world. At the very top was bare rock and soil, eroded and stripped of nutrients by human traffic and the steady winds blowing off the North Sea.

People have used these “hills” for millennia, as evidenced by archeological finds dating back to the Bronze Age, Iron Age, and Roman Empire. From above, you can see terraces plowed into the sides of Arthur’s Seat from rig-and-furrow farming, dating back to the 5^th century AD and used for a thousand years. The ruins of an ancient stone chapel and fort are still visible, as well.

Arthur’s Seat also inspired scientists from many disciplines to reconsider the earth’s age and formation. There, an 18th-century Scottish geologist named James Hutton discovered a section of rock composed of two contrasting segments of igneous (volcanic) and (older) sedimentary rock adjacent to one another. This was evidence that the rocks formed over long spans of time, when volcanic magma pushed through the existing sedimentary rock. The discovery spurred a new school of thought called “Uniformitarianism”, which emphasized that the “present is key to the past,” and that ancient, ongoing geological processes are still at work today. His theory is often credited with influencing Charles Darwin, a friend and contemporary of Hutton’s. Due to his expansive geology research, Hutton is known widely as the “Father of Modern Geology.”

9