Professor Iain Stewart has a great job.

One week he's yomping across the landscape of Scotland delivering sweet-sounding voiceovers, the next he's travelling the globe looking at ... rocks.

Like Ross Geller in Friends, Iain has a passion for the inanimate and the ancient.

While filming new series How the Earth Made Us, the geologist travelled the globe reflecting on how epic forces have shaped our human lives.

But there was one element that kept registering with him - how many of the great theories and breakthroughs of geology had been pioneered by men who were inspired by the landscape of his own native Scotland.

Iain said: "It is amazing how many pioneering discoveries came from Scotland but it's not something which is widely known beyond geological circles. It seemed to me there was a story to be told."

Men of Rock is the latest of BBC Scotland's Landscape season.

Iain visits the places which inspired pioneers and also finds out about the mavericks behind these groundbreaking discoveries

In the first episode, he tells the story of the founding father of geology, James Hutton.

This Scottish rogue was a profound and original thinker who, 250 years ago, overturned ancient beliefs about how and when the world was formed.

Hutton had started to think about the world as a young medical student in Edinburgh. But at the age of 26, he was banished, because of his dalliances with the ladies, to a disused family farm in the Borders.

In this remote location, he began to think about soil erosion. And he looked at layers of sediment and their implications for the development and continuing life of the planet.

As Iain says, Hutton was a "deep thinker and a deep drinker".

But for all his wanton ways, he was also a God-fearing man. He came up with a theory which challenged the religious orthodoxy at a time when the nearest thing to a geology textbook was the Bible.

Iain added: "Hutton made one of the greatest leaps in human thought.

"When he looked at the landscape, he saw what no one else had seen before.

"And it was discoveries about the age of the earth that meant we could start to piece together the complex story of the life of our planet."

In this episode, Iain crosses Glen Tilt on a rope slide, crushes glass in Edinburgh and braves windbattered to mountainsides.

Nice work if you can get it. But not everybody's idea of a holiday.