An unconformity is a term from geology: a meeting place of rocks that formed millions of years apart. One of the most spectacular unconformities in the world is at Siccar Point in the Scottish Borders. Borders farmer, James Hutton, deciphered the meaning of the strange rock formation and saw into “the deep abyss of time”, realising that the earth was millions of years older than anyone knew. His discovery of “deep time” in the folded rocks revolutionised scientific thinking, upset religion and led to modern geology.
I’m amazed that I grew up in the Scottish Borders and never knew that right under my feet was the crunching place of three tectonic plates. That only five hundred millions years ago, this place was an ocean. That Appalachian salt in West Virginia comes from the same sea. That you can see the join on the coast and at Jedburgh, where Hutton first made the connection to rocks 40 miles away and felt the gut-lurch of existential awe.
I wanted to capture a sense of wonder and the feeling of currents passing through us. In the Borders, we are on not just a geological but also a political faultline. We are between states and languages, and thanks to our history and annual horse pageants, the epic is never far away. Maybe, too, living on a ridge near the border has got me mixing map, territory, terroir, soil and stone. Certainly, different scales and the closeup, far-off, animal, insect, plant and human live happily together in my mind.
I was asked to write a performance piece for Paines Plough Theatre “Come to Where I’m From” for Edinburgh Festival Fringe. “Come to’ is a “playwrights’ guide to Britain” interactive map which, at the time, had a void in the 120-mile stretch between Edinburgh and Newcastle. The original Unconformity script is longer and makes a link between the geological and the political faultline. I found lumps of greywacke and sandstone and cut a turf from the garden for the performance. Where I’m from (Hawick) has a rich dialect full of echoes of ancient languages. I once spent a term studying mediaeval German and found its rhythms and sounds familiar, thanks to the tongue I grew up hearing.
This film was made for Scottish Ecological Design Association Six Conversations on Land Use 2021, with support from the Open University in Scotland using material filmed a while back, apart from the rocks, which were filmed in Kelso.
All the film footage is from the River Tweed and its catchment. Permission to use the drone footage of the Eddleston remeandering project was kindly given by British Geological Survey. Thanks also to Tweed Forum and Tweed Foundation for permission to film at Eddleston and around the Tweed catchment during Year of Natural Scotland 2013.
Thank you to Alchemy Film Festival 2021 for headlining this film in The Crumple Zone programme of work by South of Scotland artists. It has been interesting to see how many international artists in this year’s Alchemy are also preoccupied with water, land, maps and materials and our place in among them all.
Paines Plough Come to Where I’m From 
Appalachian salt 
Alchemy Film Festival