Will and Testament

The world's oldest footprints

• 22 Jun 07, 05:17 PM

I'm back from what Davy Sims has described as my "secret mission". The Blueprint team has been filming on Valentia Island, off the coast of country Kerry. I took this picture -- which is why you can see part of my palmprint at the bottom of the image (I'm not a cameraman, ok?). We were filming the pre-title sequence of the second programme in the series, which deals with the colonisation of this island by plants and animals, and there's really no better place in Ireland to do that. Generations of Valentia Islanders have known about these strange markings on the shore. They were known locally as "the Devil's hooves"; but in the 1990s they were finally investigated scientifically and we know now that these are -- amazingly -- the oldest intact footprints in the world. They are 385 million years old and they mark the moment when primitive marine reptiles walked on the land. Signs on the island these days mark the "Tetrapod trackway", but most visitors don't seem to appreciate just how significant these tracks are. Hopefully, our Blueprint series will bring this scientific find to a much larger audience.

Matthew Parkes, a geologist at the National Museum of Ireland, who authored a guide to the tetrapod tracks, joined us on Valentia to keep me right on the science and to guard a fairly significant fossil he'd brought with him. This was a Cooksonia fossil, the oldest plant ever found on Irish soil and the forerunner of all the plants we now recognise on the island. I held this 425 million year old fossil in my hand for a piece to camera on the rocks near the tetrapod tracks and was relieved to return it to Matthew in one piece.

Which is not to say that our pieces to camera were without incident. It hardly stopped raining for the entire time we were on the island, which doesn't make for a great opening title sequence. At times, Carole O'Kane, our longsuffering programme director, must have wondered if we'd leave the island with any usable footage. But we managed to film during lulls in the weather, and the results apparently look pretty good. Jim Creagh also captured a very decent sunrise for the top of the programme, which meant getting up at 3.30 am and gathering about two hours of tape (he would wish me to point out that he sat beside the camera throughout, while Carole read Hello magazine in the car!).

I'll leave some pictures from the shoot on my Facebook page -- come by and say hello. I won't include any pictures of my rental car being pulled out of a ditch by one of the islanders in a 4x4.

Thanks to Davy for minding the shop for a couple of days.

• William Crawley