I am a dreamer. I always have been. Though not on the scale of Alexander the Great or Martin Luther King, but I do dream every night, with complex narratives and full technicolour.
As a little kid, I had three recurring dreams: Firstly, fighting a Tyrannosaurus Rex; secondly, being chased by and chasing two rusty-armoured, ginger-bearded dwarfs around an island castle; and thirdly, possessing a handheld device that could answer any question I asked of it.
Forty years later, things have changed. Firstly, in the late 70s, there were only about 12 dinosaurs, all completely different, the evolutionary gaps were enormous, and the idea that dinosaurs and birds were linked was bonkers. Now, we can smoothly trace ourselves through geological time with barely perceptible changes in speciation.
Secondly, the idea of a handheld device that can tell you everything is now commonplace. Wikipedia on a smartphone was literally my dream come true. Now, given a dash of curiosity and a modicum of search skills, everything is available.
Which brings me seamlessly to natural gas processing and 14th-century English castles.
Recently, I was working on an asset in the Irish Sea feeding into the Rampside Gas Terminal in northwest England. I had assumed this landfall to be a remnant beach-bar with a back-lagoon, and I preferred the geomorphological terms of stoss and lee to “ramp”. Immediate access to the British Geological Survey “Geology Viewer” showed me I was wrong, and the back-lagoon was where outcropping Triassic, Preesall Halite Member would be had it not enjoyed marine dissolution.
Rampside geology hosts the tiny Piel Island (0.1 km2), which has all the essentials: A pub and a castle. The castle was built by the Abbot of Furness in the early 14th Century to control the Abbey’s significant Irish Sea trade, until becoming Crown Property in the 1530s. So, Henry VIII demonstrating a very different type of dissolution. Piel Castle is purported to be constructed from the island’s beach material, which would be the Triassic orange St Bees Sandstone and grey Kirkham Mudstone Members, and utilises these different colours beautifully between sandstone quoins and window details versus mudstone rough wall fill.
The BGS is a British national treasure. At a time when certain government bodies are being mocked as wasteful and dismantled, I’d like to remind us all that the BGS, and the USGS, and every similar geoscience authority are the foundation to our national endeavours.
To close a circle, my dwarf chasing dream was set around my local childhood castle, the similarly named Peel Castle, situated on the boundary between grey Silurian metapelites and orange-brown Devonian sandstone and, again, beautifully built.
All that said, and praise aside, the BGS hasn’t yet explained the dwarfs.