This chapter is set in the North West Highlands of Scotland - amongst the oldest landscapes on Earth. The Lewisian Gneisses, a striped and banded family of rocks that form a hummocky plateau along the north west sea-board of Scotland, were formed between 2.5 and 3 billion years ago. Scattered around this hummocky plateau are the outliers of Torridon sandstone, the remains of a once vast escarpment, worn down over the course of a billion years into striking and solitary inselbergs that stand like the mesas and buttes of the Colorado plains.