
But I couldn't resist adding this second as it is one of my favourite pictures - I love the 'abstractness' of it.

It shows the rock formation at the bottom of Onchan Head - and, as you can tell by the seawater in the hollows, it is the ground surface - so horizontal. And clearly those, now vertical, layers would have first been formed horizontally and upheaval has caused them to lie as they do. A friend who is a geologist explained to me that this particular stone is "an instance of contact metamorphism where an older sedementary rock (limestone, apparently, which can also be varved, or deposited in distinctive layers) is cooked by contact with an intrusive igneous body".