Oh how much I want you at my birthday party. You’ll make the day so much more fun. I do so hope you can make it. Goodbye sister, my dearest soul.

Claudia Severa, inviting her sister Lepidina to her birthday party

It can be a sobering experience to realise what little trace our ancestors have left of their lives. When we pass, our family and friends will remember us well, but our grandchildren less so, and beyond that perhaps only fragments of memories remain. Perhaps we will be lucky and make some grand contribution to society that is remembered for generations but, as Bill Bryson has so memorably written, we don’t even know if England’s greatest bard spelled his name Shakespeare or Shakespear – or even when he was born. The Mayan civilisation once covered the whole of the Yucatán Peninsula, but we still don’t know why it collapsed. Closer to home, we can only guess what the stone rows and circles of Dartmoor were used for, the hut circles once inhabited now broken and scattered to the moor.

Now we live in a digital age, with our photos carefully backed up to huge servers, warehouses filled with microchips to collect our every action and memory. We are comforted by the knowledge that we will never be deleted, that our memories will never fade. But will those servers still be accessible in a hundred or a thousand years? One of the joys of geology is the contemplation of deep time, life bursting into existence, mass extinctions, and humanity barely even making it into the last scene in the great play of life. In the vast enormity of space and time, all we really have are the shared moments that tie us all together.

So the mundane remains of everyday life from ages past have a profound rarity and value. A note, a baby’s shoe, a boxing glove – all with tales to tell. They connect us directly to a person just like us. We can imagine Claudia’s excitement at her birthday party (11th September, around 100AD, at Vindolanda in Northumberland if you’re free), her optimism that her sister could maybe join her, the laughter and love that flowed when Lepidina arrived. I like to think that she did, by the way. I don’t like to think of Claudia feeling sad, missing her friend on her birthday. I hope the wine flowed, the sun shone and she had a wonderful day.

Every time we rediscover an object like this, we keep someone somewhere alive.

According to archaeologists, climate change is threatening some of these rare windows into the past. Organic finds such as Claudia’s note are much more common in peat soil, where the lack of oxygen helps to stop them from rotting. Warmer, drier conditions dry out and desiccate the peat, meaning it erodes and crumbles away, destroying anything preserved in it. At Magna, close to Vindolanda, archaeologists say that they have lost up to a metre’s depth of peat in places. Our fragmented connections with our ancestors are at risk.

For more about some of the find at Vindolanda and the surrounding area, and the impact that peat degradation could have on this treasure trove of stories, take a look at the article Climate change threatening buried UK treasures on the BBC website.

Wow. Geology really does rock!

A lot has happened since our first geology walk back in June. The Geopark were looking for organisations to run events as part of a small post-lockdown mini Geopark Festival. It was a bit last-minute but we cobbled two events together for that week: an evening geology walk at Babbacombe, and an open ‘Meet A Geologist’ session at Torre Abbey. These being early days for Taleblazers, we didn’t have much reach and responses were slow. We nearly cancelled the geowalk a couple of days before because we only had a couple of bookings, but I remembered some advice from somewhere that when starting a new business you should never cancel anything and we went ahead with an audience of half a dozen hardy enthusiasts. I was really nervous but stumbled through my explanations, we had a pint afterwards and decided that everyone seemed pretty happy so we should probably do another.

A couple of days later, I seemed to be facing a quiet day at Torre Abbey before my two sons, on half term from school, intervened and politely charmed in 100 people to look at my collection of rocks and maps on the open day. It wasn’t the last time I would glad of other people spreading the word on our behalf. Our next walk was planned for a few weeks later at Goodrington, and word was starting to spread. My amazing first group of walkers were busy on social media, telling people how much they’d enjoyed it, inviting friends, telling people on websites I’d never heard of about the next walk. It sold out.

We were up and running. From then on, much to my astonishment, every walk sold out. Together we got our eyes in peering at the fossils at Hopes Nose, slid on our bums down the precipitous little slope at Triangle Point, puzzled over the Neptunian dykes at Shoalstone, and I loved every minute. In July I nervously gave a presentation to the English Riviera UNESCO Global Geopark Management Group, and was thrilled when we were accepted as Associate Partners at the end of the meeting. The walks continued and seemed to sell out quicker every time. We finished on a high, returning to Goodrington on a super-low tide to take in the unconformities and mysterious burrows around the intertidal headlands. It was just brilliant. Geology to me is endlessly fascinating: an eternal record of past environments and landscapes, the drama of volcanic eruptions and the slow violence of mountain-building, a window into a past so distant and different our minds can barely comprehend the scale of it all. I hope I managed to get some of this across over the weeks of our walks.

So thank you to everyone who took a punt and came out to find out what it was all about. I hope you all learned something new about our amazing Geopark and the geology found here, perhaps gained a little insight into why it is internationally important, maybe even gained enough knowledge to share a bit of the love with your friends and family. And thank you in particular to those first six people who did so much to spread the word and perhaps even believed in me a little bit more than I did.

The walks are now finished for the season, those long sunny evenings on the coast seeming so far away now, the coast altogether more blustery and less hospitable. We’ll pick them up again as soon as the clocks go forward, but in the meantime there is our winter course where we’ll be learning about the geology of the Geopark in the warm at Torre Abbey. I’d love to see you there.