122 
In a letter dated roth of February last he says :— 
**T found an intelligent old man, Robert Johnston, who told me that 
fifteen or sixteen years ago the channel, which shifts about very much, in 
cutting its way into the sand formed a steep bank on one side, on the edge 
of the wide flat of sand which stretches away from Cardurnock towards 
Criffel, and laid bare three or four feet of peat, below five or six feet of 
sand.” Wood was found imbedded in the peat, ‘‘some of which was taken 
out by a person curious in such matters, but when exposed to the air it 
soon ‘merled’ away.” The channel again shifted, and the place became 
covered with sand, and, Mr. Brockbank remarks, ‘“‘when I saw it to-day 
there was an unbroken stretch of sand, extending, I was informed, two- 
and-a-half miles from the edge of the grass marsh near Cardurnock to where 
the channel is now running.” 
Some little consolation in the present state of things may be 
found in the fact that the sandy covering effectually preserves the 
submerged forest below from denuding influences, for the edification 
of future generations ; or possibly, even for that of the present, as 
no one can say whether the channels are more likely to be favour- 
able in five years’ time or in fifty. 
The existence, however, of the forest at such a level, points, like 
that at St. Bees, to the occurrence, in times, geologically speaking, 
recent, of a slight sinking as the last vertical movement to which 
this area has been subjected. As stated in the paper on the 
Raised Beach of the Cumberland coast by Mr. R. Russell and 
myself-—an abstract of which appears in Part II. of the Trans. 
Cumb: Assoc.—this subsidence took place, in all probability, some 
time after the elevation of the Raised Beach. Its effect as regards 
the raised beach was most likely to lower it from perhaps fifty to 
sixty feet above the sea to its present average height of twenty to 
thirty feet. And the effect of the subsidence on the area now 
occupied at high tide by the waters of the Solway must have been 
to convert a fertile plain watered by many rivers to the state in 
which we now see it—a broad sheet of water at high tide, and a 
sandy plain intersected by ever-shifting water-channels at low.* 
*In an interesting paper by Mr. J. D. Kendall, published in the 
Q. J. Geol. Soc., Feb. 1881, the vegetable deposits on the shore at Mary- 
port, St. Bees, Drigg, and Walney are considered to be probably interglacial, 
and of the same age as those found inland resting on the Lower Boulder 
a 
