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madeinatlantis
LONDON TRAVEL GUIDE
BRITAIN IS A WORLD BY ITSELF
LET us now set together some of the typical results of this discussion of British geography, and inquire what broad conclusion may be drawn.
1. From two historic view-points the natural features of Britain are seen in two different perspectives. Approached overland from the south-east, from the great continent, the elements of the foreground are the Strait of Dover, the Kentish promontory, the Thames estuary, and the English plain. From these the landways radiate to the uplands of the oceanic border. Approached, however, from the south-west, over the seas, the significant features are the Channel Entries, whence divergent waterways penetrate between the lands.
2. This intersection of land and sea connections -- of richest historical import -- has a physical meaning, for the conformation of the neighbouring land of Scandinavia is analogous. There also, outer and higher Norway is in contrast with inner and lower Sweden, and the peninsulating Baltic is entered from the south-west. Northern Europe, in fact, has a raised broken rim, more or less detached from the mainland by seas branching from the ocean.
3. Such a description of the superficial outline is justified and reinforced by the shallowness of the Narrow and Baltic Seas, and by the continuity of the edge of the great shoal off Britain and Norway. Moreover, the fringe of headlands along the west coast of Scotland, and the lie of Glenmore and the Rift Valley, betoken a south-westerly rock-graining, to be interpreted as the wreck of a Caledonian mountain range, which once crossed the site of the North Sea.
5. But the existing hills have not been shaped from the Caledonian peaks by uninterrupted erosion. The general equivalence of the higher summits, and the transverse, southerly trend of the consequent valleys, where they breach the ridges, can only be explained by the interpolation of an epoch during which the mountains were reduced to a basal plane. Thence followed a fresh cycle of denudation when this plane was raised to a grained plateau spreading back from the British uplands towards Iceland and Greenland.
6. By what process this plateau of Atlantis collapsed, and the uplands of its south-eastward face were transferred to developing Europe, may be imagined from the form of the ocean bed. Two abysmal pits, Atlantic and Arctic, gradually encroached upon the land until they merged across it, and the divide between them became the submarine isthmus known as the Scoto-Icelandic Rise. The southward belt of median uplands in Britain -- Highland, Central, and Cambrian -- is in prolongation of this rise, and no doubt due to the same terrestrial stresses.
7. Britain was differentiated from the rest of the slope of Atlantis by the formation of proto-Britain, in advance of the Caledonian shore line. Against the resistance of this salient block the Hercynian pressures crumpled the strata into northward and westward folds: these, together with the earlier south-westward features, have determined the triangular outline of Britain.
8. By their intersection the Hercynian axes also shaped the coal-basins of Great Britain. But Ireland, under the lee of proto-Britain, suffered less disturbance, and has therefore been stripped of most of its coal, unsheltered from denudation.
9. The posthumous Hercynian uplift, by raising the Wealden fold, produced an organic connection between the Kentish promontory and the Rhine-Seine divide. The English plain of softer rocks is, therefore, a segment of the coastal plain of Atlantis, preserved and brought into European relations by subsequent events.
10. The broad north-eastward ocean-channel which has replaced Atlantis, determines the climatic conditions of Britain, by inducing in the atmosphere a corresponding north-eastward gulf of winter warmth and moisture. Therefore the iceless sea, and the cyclonic procession off the open shores of Ireland and Scotland, may be regarded as proceeding from the same events which cut short the oceanic uplands and beheaded the consequent rivers of Britain.
11. And as the northward belt of median uplands and the Scoto-Icelandic Rise intersect the trend of the northeastward oceanic border, so the rain-shadow, extending into Scotland under the eastern lee of the Highlands, lies obliquely to the most frequented path of the cyclones. Thus the climatic contrasts of Britain harmonise with its structure.
12. The same is true of the anthropic aspects of British geography. The east side of the Hercynian triangle is opposed to the Baltic lands, and the south side -- through Gaul and the gap between the Pyrenees and the Alps -to the Mediterranean lands. Upon these two sides are based the northward spread of the darker men in Britain, and the westward spread of the lighter.
13. But the contrasted radial advance of conquerors from the Kentish angle to the oceanic border is illustrated by the terminal remnants of Celtic speech.
14. The four parts of the realm are structural no less than historic units. Wales is in some degree a remainder of the proto-British land-block. The three kingdoms, prior to the industrial revolution, were in essence three lowlands, sundered by march-belts of barren upland and sea-channel.
15. The English lowland consists of the soft, tilted, overlapping strata characteristic of a coastal plain. It was marginal to Atlantis, but was extended towards Europe by the Wealden uplift. Beneath is a buried floor with coal basins emergent along the north-western edge. The European climatic system frequently overspreads it. Its chief properties are therefore breadth, arable fertility, and potentially of mechanical power -- fit bases for the growth of the predominant partner in the union of kingdoms.
16. Ireland, on the other hand, has a pre-Hercynian plain, preserved by proto-Britain, consisting of almost undisturbed strata, which lap round emergent, ancient bosses of upland. The coal has been removed from above this plain by denudation. The soil has usually fewer constituents than in England; and the climate is oceanic, hence the surface is generally of meadow and bog.
17. The Scottish plain is smallest of the three, merely the floor of a valley, rifted into the median belt of upland. But it has stored coal, and on the lee side rewards tillage.
18. The sites of the three capitals strikingly exhibit the effect of these contrasts. London, in the continental angle, but not far removed from the midst of the English lowland, is a focus of many ways radiating freely over the plain. The most important is that which enters through Kent, and leaves through the Cheshire gap, which is itself a legacy from the old Hebridean Gulf.
19. Dublin, opposite to Cheshire, is in the broad coastal entry of Meath, whence roads diverge northward, westward, and southward, through gaps among the isolated uplands.
20. Edinburgh is in the defile between the Pentlands and the coast, at the head of the sill-entry to the enwalled Rift Valley.
21. Finally, a vast imperial nodality has been accumulated in London during the centuries of oceanic mobility. As the trend of this argument is surveyed, may we not conclude that on the whole the same geographical features are important whether measured by historical or by physical standards? And are not the topographical monuments of geological revolution among the causes of analogous revolution in history? The structural slope of Britain inward towards Europe is an expression of growth from the northern Atlantis: the whole recent history of mankind would have been other than it has been, were the landward angle of England divided from the continent by a channel rifted through uplands. To the existence of proto-Britain, and to rock movements in the vast Hercynian crises, is due the triangular outline of Britain, resulting in that insulation without isolation which has made of the British state at once "a world by itself " and a great European Power. Moreover, the Industrial Revolution of English history could never have been accomplished unless preceded by the Hercynian Revolution, for the coal upon which the one change rested was preserved in the process of the other. By dividing the Seine and Rhine basins, and by accentuating the saliency of England towards the continent, the Wealden uplift has emphasised the contrast of the Romance and Teutonic influences which have interacted in British society. The great encroachment of the ocean behind the uplands of the northwest has determined the climate, and so permitted of the pastoral and maritime activities of Britain, notwithstanding the poleward latitude. Finally, the long brink of the submarine platform, by checking the advance of the oceanic tides, has originated the tidal currents of the Narrow Seas. It is not unlikely that the completion of British insularity by the broadening of Dover Strait was due to the scour of these currents when reinforcing wind-waves which had otherwise no great potency.
There is, however, a noteworthy, though inevitable and connected, inversion of the physical and historical relations of Britain. The British Isles have been built from a north-western foundation, but the British people and realm have grown in the main from south-eastern roots. By a progressive physical change, Britain has been transferred from Atlantis to Europe: by an inverse, but analogous, change the British community has passed from dependence upon continental Europe to be the outpost of the new Europe beyond the ocean. A constant recipient from the gifted races of the neighbouring continent, it has been the special function of the insular nation to convey to the outer lands what was best not merely in British but in European civilisation.
By virtue of her neighbourhood to the Continent, Britain is at the end of the Old World; by virtue of the ocean-arm which isolates her from the Continent, she is at the beginning of the New. Dover belongs to the New World, yet Liverpool is still of the Old. Geographical position has thus given to Britain a unique part in the world's drama. But the end of her history must depend on the ethical condition of her people, on their energy, knowledge, honesty, and faith. For the permanent facts of physical geography now bear a proportion to political organisation differing widely from that borne when England was making. In the presence of vast Powers, broad-based on the resources of half continents, Britain could not again become mistress of the seas. Much depends on the maintenance of a lead won under earlier conditions. Should the sources of wealth and vigour upon which the navy is founded run dry, the imperial security of Britain will be lost. From the early history of Britain herself it is evident that mere insularity gives no indefeasible title to marine sovereignty. In this respect the present situation is analogous to the condition which has here been described as of geographical inertia. It is the great opportunity of human initiative. The whole course of future history depends on whether the Old Britain beside the Narrow Seas have enough of virility and imagination to withstand all challenge of her naval supremacy, until such time as the daughter nations shall have grown to maturity, and the British Navy shall have expanded into the Navy of the Britains.
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