This set of six papers arises from the International Eclogite Field Symposium held in Scotland during July 2007 (IEFS2007). A second set of papers from IEFS2007 has been published elsewhere (see Dobrzhinetskaya et al. 2008). The meeting was one of a biennial series organized under the auspices of the International Eclogite Conference Co-ordinating Committee, and marked the 25th anniversary of the first meeting in 1982. Seventy-five delegates from 20 countries gathered in Portree on the Isle of Skye. The field element of the meeting focused upon the nearby Glenelg–Attadale Inlier, a basement unit of the Moine Nappe and part of the classic Moine Thrust system in the western Highlands (see symposium field guide: Storey 2008a,b). This was the first place in the UK where eclogites (high-pressure metabasaltic garnet–clinopyroxene rocks) were recognized (Teall 1891), and has attracted several prominent researchers in metamorphic and structural geology (e.g. Tilley 1936; Ramsay 1958; Sutton & Watson 1959; O'Hara 1960). Although one of the smaller eclogite-facies terrains in global terms, the Glenelg–Attadale Inlier is significant in that it is one of the very few examples of Precambrian high-pressure metamorphism (Sanders et al. 1984; Brewer et al. 2003; Storey et al. 2004).

IEFS2007 celebrated the life and work of Dennis Anthony (Tony) Carswell, who sadly died on 8 June 2006 while still very much at the height of his intellectual powers. Tony was active in research in eclogite-facies rocks from the early 1960s, and was consistently at the forefront of developments in the field, publishing over 120 papers on the subject with an astonishing total of 85 different co-authors (see Dobrzhinetskaya et al. 2008 for a more extensive appreciation of his career). He edited the book Eclogite Facies Rocks (Carswell 1990), which …