We trace our families back in time, and go further back when we visit sites from the past - brochs, cairns, and stone circles. But the Deep Time of geology moves on a different scale. A million years is not even a long weekend in the history of the Earth. So we try to find way to picture the immense scale of the geological processes that shaped the land on which we stand.
The Orkney International Science Festival film As Old as the Hills receives its Edinburgh premiere in March. That’s timely – the celebrations of the 300th anniversary of the birth of James Hutton, the father of modern geology, start in June. It was James Hutton, born in Edinburgh on 3 June 1726, who developed the picture of the Earth as shaped by long, immensely slow, geological processes. The film shows a varied range of ways for us to visualise the vastness of their timescale.
And the location for the showing of the film is perfect – the venue is just 400 yards from Hutton’s birthplace in the Old Town. There are lots of events planned for his anniversary year H300 – talks, walks, concerts, and radio shows – so it’s a fine time for the new film to premiere. Demand for tickets has been so good that only a few remain.
Slovenian filmmaker Selena S. Kuzman takes us on an epic scenic journey through Caithness and Orkney, with magnificent drone footage. Along the way, presenters Mara Gibb and Katy Firth use quirky timelines and models to help the viewer to grasp the immensity of geological time. Edinburgh geomorphologist Adrian Hall wrote the script. We find that rock hills have half-lives of tens or even hundreds of millions of years. But soft hills, like sand dunes and glacial drumlins, appear and disappear over thousands of years. These are truly Huttonian themes – Deep Time, the rock cycle, the formation of soil, the work of the sea in erosion. Watch out for the final Da Vinci Code twist supplied by the renowned Orkney storyteller Tom Muir. For any lover of the great outdoors this film is a must-see.
The Orkney premiere was in the Science Festival in September, with many people there. The film was shown in Elgin by Moray Field Club in February 2026, with an excellent turnout and much interest. It is being made freely available for communities and organisations to show, and it fits so well into this year of Hutton, showing a varied mix of practical ways in which to portray the scales of time that he opened up to the world.
Hutton quite simply revolutionised the way we see the Earth. Copernicus, Galileo and Kepler had broken through the 2000-year-old picture of the Earth at the centre of the universe, but just everyone – including Sir Isaac Newton – believed it had suddenly come into existence in its complete state around 4000 BC. Hutton turned this picture upside down. The Earth was not static, he said, but subject to processes that we can see around us today, from volcanism to coastal erosion, and over long enough timescales these processes can have a cumulative effect. The film helps us to picture them in a range of ways, from baselines ranging from the length of the A9 to the height of St Magnus Cathedral.
The film was made possible by support from EventScotland.
