Roads of Stone

Roads of Stone is a great blog by a geologist who happens to be a runner - or maybe it's the other way around. I've been meaning to say something about this blog for a while; it's been listed in my sidebar since forever (forever started early last year).

Recently, late last year, Roads had a great post combining the geology of the Hog's Back - in what I would call southeast England, south of London - with an annual 8-mile race called the Hog’s Back Road Race. He wrote, in part:

For a hundred million years as the Atlantic widened, a block of old rocks beneath London stood eroding, above a muddy river plain to the south. Then as the coastlines encroached northwards a hundred million years ago, tidal bars and beaches swept sands along their reach.

And later on:

It’s a fantastic story — the geological history of the past two hundred million years defining the lie of the landscape I’ll run across today.

Just to get you interested, I'm showing here a location map with some general geology and a photo not shown in his post.

Photo by roadsofstone.com of the stair hole inversion monocline, Lulworth Cove, Dorset, England.

Go check out this post on a great example of "the biggest inversion monocline in all of Southern England." And while you're there, read more about other parts of the world, where roads, running, and geology all come together.

And besides, I'm really into races today, ones of a slightly different kind.