314 STKATIGRAPHICAL GEOLOGY 



compression, which resulted in the production of several systems of 

 flexures, but especially of a great series of folds having a general 

 direction from west to east. 



This series of flexures is known as the Armorican or Hercynian 

 System, and it extends from the south-west corner of Ireland 

 through South Wales, Devon, and Cornwall. Thence it passes 

 under the whole of Southern England and through the north-east 

 of France and Belgium. Another part of the same series passes 

 through Brittany and Normandy and under the Paris basin till it 

 emerges in the Ardennes. The combined series then extends 

 through the Rhine Province of Germany, through Westphalia and 

 the rest of Germany to Poland and the northern border of Bohemia. 

 These Armorican flexures are narrow and the synclines are deep ; 

 the folds are sometimes overthrust and often broken by faults. 



North of this series of flexures in England we find another set, 

 or rather two sets which cross one another nearly at right angles, 

 and it is to the intersection of these two sets of folds that the pro- 

 duction of Coal-measure basins is due. The one set runs approxi- 

 mately north and south, and is exemplified in the ridge of the 

 Malvern and Abberley Hills, where Upper Coal-measures are 

 included in one of the flexures, and yet the folding is shown to be 

 pre- Permian by the position of Permian strata on a plane of erosion 

 cut across these flexures. Farther north is the parallel anticline of 

 the South Pennine area, which separates the flanking synclines 

 occupied by the Coal-measures of Nottingham and Yorkshire on the 

 one side and of North Stafford and Lancashire on the other side. 

 Here again the pre-Permian age of the main flexures is indicated 

 by the position of the Permian Beds overlying them in Notting- 

 hamshire, though there may have been further uplifts in Triassic 

 time, and still later in Tertiary times. The North Pennine faults 

 in West Yorkshire, Westmoreland, and Cumberland were also in 

 part pre-Permian. 



The other set of flexures runs approximately from W.S.W. to 

 E.N.E., and may be termed the Lancastrian Series. They differ 

 markedly from the nearly parallel Armorican folds in being very 

 broad and comparatively shallow undulations. Such is the broad 

 anticline of the Kibble Valley and its continuation across Yorkshire, 

 which passes eastward under the Permian of that county. 



For a fuller account of these flexures the reader is referred to 

 the new edition of my Building of the British Isles (1911), but 

 which of the two series is the older has not yet been determined. 



While uplift, disturbance, and erosion were going on in the 

 north of Europe, deposition was still in progress farther south, and 

 more especially over the eastern part of Europe. In the western 



