Some 700 million years ago, our small part of the earth’s crust emerged from the sea for the first time, as part of a chain of volcanic islands, rather similar to Java and Sumatra today. These islands lay near the Antarctic Circle, off the northern coast of a large supercontinent, known as Gondwana, under which the floor of an ocean – the Iapetus - was being destroyed down a trench. This talk will aim to chart the geological “adventures” of this small section of the crust as it moved northward to its present position over hundreds of millions of years, and to outline the evidence contained in local rocks that allows such a story to be constructed.