UK Landscape Overview

One question, four answers

Geography B builds this topic around a single enquiry question: why does the physical landscape of the UK vary from place to place? Drive from the Highlands to Kent and the ground changes completely: mountain, then moor, then rolling hill, then flat farmland. Four things explain almost all of it, and this module is those four: the rock, the tectonics, the ice, and us.

How hard should you revise this?

This overview is compulsory, and it is followed by a choice topic (coastal or river) that you study in depth. How should you weight your revision?

• Learn this overview well enough to explain the variation, then spend most of your time on the choice topic
• Give it exactly the same time as the choice topic, since both are examined
• Skip it, since the choice topic is where the marks are
• Spend most of your time here, because it covers the whole UK

The four reasons

Each of these left something behind that you can still see in the landscape today:

Read the profile

This is a cross-section of Britain, north-west on the left and south-east on the right. Tap the part made of the OLDER, HARDER rock.

Why is the north higher?

Why do the north and west of Britain have higher, more rugged relief than the south and east?

• Their older igneous and metamorphic rock is more resistant, so it has been worn down more slowly
• It rains more there, and rain builds up the land
• Land is naturally higher the further north you go
• Fewer people live there, so less of the land has been flattened

What the ice left behind

During the last ice age, ice sheets covered most of northern Britain, and they did two different jobs at the two ends of the country. In the uplands they cut. Glaciers carved out U-shaped valleys, corries and ribbon lakes, which is why the Lake District, Snowdonia and the Scottish Highlands look the way they do. In the lowlands they dumped. Melting ice left thick deposits of clay, sand and gravel across the flatter land further south. Same ice, opposite effects.

Match each process to what it left in the landscape

What people change

Select the TWO ways human processes have shaped the UK's physical landscape.

• Flooding upland valleys to create reservoirs
• Quarrying rock, leaving permanent cuts in hillsides
• Building the mountain ranges of Scotland and Wales
• Causing the ice age that carved the uplands

Older rock in the north and west

The north and west of Britain are built from older, _____ rock, which resists erosion and stands as upland. The south and east are built from younger, _____ rock and form lowland. In the uplands, glaciers _____ the landscape, while in the lowlands melting ice _____ its load. On top of all of it, _____ processes have added reservoirs, quarries and field patterns.

Answer the question

Answer the topic's own enquiry question in a single paragraph: why does the physical landscape of the UK vary from place to place?

• Start with rock type, and link it to relief rather than just naming the rocks
• Bring in one past process, tectonic or glacial, and say what it left behind
• Add one way human processes have changed the landscape
• Contrast one upland area with one lowland area by name
• Keep it to a paragraph: this is an overview, and the detail belongs to your choice topic