Potes on the Geology of the Pale of 
Tltovd. 
BY T. McKENNY .HUGHES, M.A., F.S.A.,,F.G.S., 
WoopwarpIAN Proressor or GEOLoGcy, CAMBRIDGE; PRESIDENT OF THE 
CHESTER NATURAL SCIENCE Society. 
Read in abstract Thursday, November 25th, 1880. 
IW\HE area drained by the Clwyd and its tributaries is one of 
the most interesting in North Wales, whether we look to 
its Geological structure or to the struggles that have been 
going on in it since man has dwelt there. Its rich pastures 
and pleasant dwelling places have been well fought over from 
the earliest period of which we have any history, and far back 
into what are called prehistoric times—as witness its numerous 
castles with their battered towers, and its ancient camps with 
ditches full of dead men’s bones. And before man had fairly 
established himself there, fierce wild beasts, whose remains are 
found in its caverns, struggled for the monopoly of the most 
secluded lairs and richest feeding grounds. As we trace the 
history back we find that the district has always been subject 
to great vicissitudes, geologically’ speaking; to successive 
conquests of land by sea and of sea by land. 
In fact we meet at the commencement of our enquiry a 
suggestion of one of the great laws of geology, that what has 
been an elevated range in very remote periods is generally 
elevated over and over again, and therefore along the edge of 
a mountain region we are apt to find traces of ancient denuda- 
tions, showing the waste of rising lands; and there we find also 
the shingle and sand indicating shore deposits as the land 
went down and up again in each successive era. So on the 
border lands of Wales we find the shore deposits of the 
Carboniferous sea creeping up ancient valleys in the old 
Silurian and Cambrian rocks. And again the earliest New Red 
‘rocks, pockety patches of the base of which are sometimes 
wrongly called Permian, show a recurrence later on of very 
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