Three talks describing how, when and who first colonised Earth’s landscapes. After some 4 billion years of soil-less and lifeless landscapes, primitive plants slowly greened the land along with their evolving communities of animals. Our understanding of how it took around 200 million years for life to spread from shorelines to highlands has developed enormously over the last few decades. Because of the plate tectonic history of the British Isles, our geological record and the geologists who have investigated the rocks and fossils have played an important role in understanding ‘First Footing’ in the history of life.