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The Geology of Ireland edited by Charles Holland, Dunedin Academic Press, £55, ISBN 1903765072

WE were terribly modern when I was a student in the early 1970s. Plate tectonics had just given geology an all-embracing theory. Young tyros in flares declared that fieldwork was dead. We were no longer geologists: we had transformed into earth scientists, full of physics and formulae, Fortran, remote sensors and machines that went ping. Regional geology became a term of abuse. It was old hat, grey flannels and not much better than geography.

All of which was a huge disappointment to me, because my fogeyish interests were small, tweedy and provincial, and I couldn’t add up. I didn’t trust things I couldn’t hit with a hammer. I got excited about the grand sweep only if I could see it through the wrong-way telescope of the local historian. My kind of geology was finished.

Or was it? This magnificent, fully revised and unapologetically old-style textbook suggests otherwise. Although the authors, rightly, do not shrink from Ireland’s global context, what impresses you most is their command of local detail: a mountain of mournful data, unashamedly scholarly and stuffed with references. This, thank God, is a long way from “student-centred learning”, and not to be taken lightly. You will be spared nothing.