Another kind of dyke

It is a lovely day today, clear and dry and not too cold, so I decided to take a walk along the shore. Geology has always fascinated me, and the folded rocks here display some wonderful patterns. This shot shows a Scourie dyke (the dark band running up the centre) cutting through the local Lewisian Gneiss basement. These dykes (sort of like vertical walls of iron-rich magma) are dated around 2,200 million years ago, but the rocks that they cut through were over 1000 million years ago even then. Both the dykes and the surrounding rock have been folded and twisted over millions of years since then and sometimes you get fantastic shapes in the buckled stone.