Peach & Horne

An amateur geologist, Charles Lapworth, had recently overturned Murchison’s accepted view that the rocks between Durness and Assynt demonstrated a typical, simple sequence of younger formations lying on top of older ones. Lapworth worked out that the older rocks had been heaved up and over younger rocks millions of years ago, along a fault line known as the Moine Thrust. In 1883 Sir Archibald Geikie, Murchison’s successor at the Geological Survey, despatched Peach and Horne to investigate but then had difficulty coming to terms with their conclusion that the amateur had been correct all along!

Peach and Horne greatly enjoyed their fieldwork in Sutherland, Peach being an accomplished artist, a keen naturalist and a palaeontologist, but also an enthusiastic fisherman. With another colleague he found the first ever Scottish snow bunting’s nest on Ben More Assynt in 1886. In 1929, a few years after his death, Edinburgh Geologists celebrated his approach to fieldwork at their annual dinner with the several verses, sung to the tune of ‘John Peel’:

D’ye ken Ben Peach with his shoulders broad
His dimpled cheek and his smiling nod.
D’ye ken Ben Peach with his reel and his rod,
As he starts for the loch in the morning. . .