46 A CHAPTER IN THE PHYSICAL GECGRAPHY OF THE PAST. 
presents, especially when viewed from its eastern side, a bold, 
serrated edge, in strange contrast to the gently flowing outline of 
most of the other hills of the Midlands. Its jagged and craggy 
summit, under certain atmospheric conditions, has a strangely 
mountainous aspect, and has often been justly compared with a 
miniature Alpine range. This resemblance, after all, is not a 
fancied one, for the Charnwood hills have all the characteristics 
of a true mountain range. It was pointed out, many years ago, 
by the late Professor Jukes that here, within a very small area, 
and without any laborious climbing, we can study at our leisure 
nearly all the geological phenomena afforded by mountainous 
districts. Although of very diminutive proportions as compared 
with the mountain chains of Europe, we must bear in mind that 
denudation has played its part here also, and that it is only a ruin 
of its former self. Its elevation, doubtless coeval with that of the 
Pennine Range, took place at a very remote period of the world’s 
history. The now lofty chains of the Alps, the Pyrenees, the 
Andes, and, in fact, nearly all the important mountain ranges of 
the world, are but mere children in point of age when compared 
with the venerable antiquity of our Leicestershire hill country. In 
fact, the Charnwood area had an elevation far in excess of its 
present height, and had been subjected to denuding forces ages 
before the sedimentary rocks, which form the greater part of 
those mountain chains, had even been laid down in their ocean 
beds. 
The Charnwood ridge has been produced by an anticlinal fold 
with its axis running N.W. and S.E. This fold has been ruptured 
at the crown of the arch by the great forces which brought about 
its elevation, and the western ridge has in consequence been 
forced some 500 feet higher than the eastern, Such a 
rupture, attended with the vertical uplift of the rock on one side 
of the great earth crack, is called a fau/t, and if it had not been 
for the constant planing action of sub-ierial forces keeping 
pace with the slow uplift, we should have had one side of the 
range elevated as a lofty wall of rock above the other side. As it 
is, however, nature has so planed the surface that the old scar is 
