Glen Tilt, 1785, from album of drawings with illustrations for Hutton

In depth text by John Bonehill:

In the late summer of 1785, Hutton and Clerk of Eldin found themselves scrambling over stone and heather in the steep valley of Glen Tilt, just north-east of Blair Atholl in upland Perthshire. They were there as the guests of the 4th Duke of Atholl, joining him on a stag hunt and staying in the hunting lodge depicted in Clerk’s view along the meandering road through the glen. Struck by the grandeur and remoteness of the setting, Hutton thought it perhaps ”the most removed . . . of any in Britain from the habitations of men”. Something of the vastness of the landscape is conveyed by Clerk’s drawings, which with the inclusion of buildings, bridges and roads also maintain a sense of human scale. A carriage makes its way along the road or a ploughman can be seen tilling the field. But their presence may also acknowledge the disparity between the frame of human history and the scale of time required to account for geological events. ”How shall we acquire the knowledge of a system calculated for millions, not of years only, nor of the ages of man, but of races of men, and the succession of empire?”, Hutton asked.

Clerk’s drawings are also richly informative about the structure of the landscape, however. With their simple washes of greys and pinks, they ably capture the delicate, subtle palette of Glen Tilt’s molten granite. He also found ways to illustrate what Hutton identified as ‘unconformities’ in the earth, where horizontal and differently angled strata from a much earlier moment intersect. On seeing one of Hutton’s unconformities, Hutton’s friend John Playfair likened it to looking upon ”the abyss of time”.