The Map That Changed the World: William Smith and the Birth of Modern Geology

They might have recognized in their strange companion what some of today's middle-aged recognize in the young electronics visionaries... a man who, though part of their world, still had a view that was somehow larger than theirs, that he had firm sight of a future that he somehow knew was better, as well as being a future that was definably different and, most crucially, utterly unlike the world of the present.

To cross the southern coast of England, west to east, is thus to travel forwards - and at breathtaking chronological speed - in a self-propelled time-machine. With every few hundred yards of eastward progress one passes through hundreds of thousands of years of geological time: a million years of history goes by with every couple of miles march.