North Sea Oil and Gas

The writer Esther Woolfson contrasts the solidity of Aberdeen, the 'Granite City', with the decline of the North Sea oil and gas industry, on which its economy has so relied since the 1970s. It's part of this week's series of Cornerstones - nature writing about rock, place and landscape. Author of 'Field Notes from a Hidden City', about her encounters with Aberdeen's wildlife, Esther reflects on the city's relationship with the North Sea hydrocarbons industry, and how much the city has been affected by the waning oil boom. She contrasts the city's big, public granite Victorian edifices with the slow creation in past millennia beneath the seabed of the oil and gas hydrocarbons which have powered the modern world. Among the other Cornerstones essays this week, the writer Alan Garner reflects upon flint, the stone that has enabled human civilisation, and Sara Maitland considers Lewisian gneiss, so much a rock of ages that it is two-thirds the age of the earth itself. Producer: Mark Smalley Image: Courtesy of the artist Rose Ferraby