EXCURSION IV. 97 



Wayside Museum is easily visited. Leaving the village of 

 Lower Invercloy at the smithy, and passing up the hill along 

 the old Lamlash road, we are upon it at once. It is simply 

 a stone fence bounding the road on the east side, and reach- 

 ing from the brow of the old sea-cliff to the top of the hill. 

 The rocks of which it consists have been gathered from the 

 adjoining fields, across which they were borne from the 

 mountains and hills to the north and west, during the long 

 period when the island was wrapped in its icy sheet. 



As we pass up from the level of the sea to the top of the 

 terrace a height of five-and-twenty feet the geological and 

 picturesque features of the mountain nucleus come grandly 

 out. In front the granite peak of Cior-Mhor and serrated 

 granite ridges of the Ceims (Kyims), Ben Tarsuin, and Ben 

 Ghnuis, tower above the flat- topped, steep-sided foreground 

 of slate and Old Red. On the extreme right, Maoldon, with 

 its rounded top of fossiliferous sandstone, rivals in height the 

 slate plateau south-west of Goatfell. Planed off across the 

 line of dip, and in the line of strike, these sandstone beds, 

 with their intercalated limestones, stretch along the uniform 

 line far down to Merkland Point, while their gentle south- 

 ward inclinations form the charming woods and glades about 

 the castle. Subsiding beneath the alluvial plain of Brodick, 

 whose bay, excavated in their yielding sti-ata, once reached 

 as far as Glen Rosa, these sandstones, bearing the limestones 

 with them, have been heaved up into a long narrow ridge, 

 which culminates on the extreme left in the rugged porphyry 

 of Windmill Hill and rounded top of Ploverfield, whose 

 granites and syenites reach thence across the moors to points 

 out of sight, by the heads of the Ben-leister and Clachan 

 Glens. As we pass to the summit level of the road, the 

 Sheans come in sight knolls of diorite capping sandstone, 

 which isolates them. 



50. As the position of the rocks in our Wayside Museum 

 is wholly fortuitous, we shall notice them in the order of 

 their age. Granite occurs in several varieties, exhibiting 



