34 ^ MONOGRAPH OF DURA DEN. 



been broken up, and the minerals tossed about or agitated like 

 wreck upon the waves, and subsiding, have been cast into the 

 form of ridges, or of broad tabular masses. The ridges, with 

 their broken edges in the interior of the county, have been 

 gradually rounded off, and are now covered with soil ; while 

 along the shores they still present the effects of the violent 

 commotions to which they have been subjected — exposed and 

 laid bare by the action of the sea upon the lower levels of the 

 disrupted strata. 



Hence the coal-metals were at once indurated, and shared in 

 the general elevation of the trap-hills, where they are either 

 folded round their bases, or are depending, drapery-wise, from 

 the sides. The lowest of the beds in the under series are raised 

 about a thousand feet along the Lomond ridge, encompassing 

 the east and west cones ; and Largo and Kelly Laws have each 

 their coal-basins, of workable minerals, stretched along their 

 eminences, while on the low grounds which skirt them on the 

 south, the metals are collected in various independent hollows 

 by the shore, and dip rapidly into the estuary of the Forth. 

 Fifeshire thus owes its diversified shape and contour, and easy 

 access to all its vast mineral treasures, to the early disturbances 

 by which it has been all over dislocated and furrowed. Every 

 district has a section, separate and independent, of its own ; 

 sweetly pastoral in its uplands ; richly alluvial in its straths 

 and valleys ; deeply loamy in its hollows and hill-sides ; pre- 

 eminently fertile in its agricultural conditions ; and in its 

 mineral stores of lime, iron, and coal, not surpassed in amount 

 and value by any proportional area on the surface of the 

 glube. 



The only other noticeable point connected with the struc- 

 tural arrangements of Dura Den, is a vein of galena or sulphu- 

 ret of lead, which occurs on the farm of Myretown of Blebo, 

 and which runs across the strata from nearly south to north. 

 Its discovery was made in the year 1722 — a 3^ear of disastrous 

 gold-hunting and ill- devised mining researches througliout 



