The geology of Eastern Fife

This memoir describes the geology of Eastern Fife, Scotland, written by Sir Archibald Geikie shortly after his retirement as Director General of the Geological Survey of Great Britain. Most of the Geological Survey memoirs of Scotland had been published during the 1870s - 1880s following the completion of the first (and still the only) systematic geological survey of Scotland which was carried out by Geikie and a handful of field surveyors during the 1860s. However, the survey of the counties of Fife and Kinross was not followed up by a memoir until more than thirty years later. According to Geikie's autobiography - "a Long Life's Work", published in 1924, the surveyor who had done most of the field work in this area refused to participate in writing a memoir. This gap in the record of what was, arguably, his greatest lifetime achievement clearly troubled Geikie for many years, to the extent that he spent two years immediately following his retirement resurveying the relevant areas and writing the memoirs in his own inimitable style. They have since become classics of Scottish Geology and have provided the foundation for the field-studies of many thousands of geologists from Scotland and beyond.