Professor P. F. Kendall — Tlie English Eskers. 99 



Now let us have his version : After exact details of the position 

 of Lanshaw Delves, " a bank about 650 yards long, 25 yards wide 

 at the west end, and 50 yards wide at the east end ; the height is 

 8 feet at the west and 15 feet at the east end ; the trend is a little 

 south of east ; the south front is the straighter and higher. The 

 summit of the Delves is irregular and hummocky, the depression 

 sometimes giving it the character of a triple ridge." 



Then follow very detailed observations of the constituents, 

 boulders, exclusively of Millstone Grit, their arrangement, and a 

 careful descrijition of the shape of the stones. " The boulders are 

 sometimes arranged in piles, but they show no arrangement in bands 

 across the Delves." I suspect that the lime-burners had little 

 incentive to arrange them in a systematic manner. 



" The smaller pebbles include vein quartz, and jagged fragments 

 of black chert ; and all of these may have been derived from the 

 Millstone Grit." (The jagged fragments of black chert, often 

 crinoidal, could not have come from the Millstone Grit, but must 

 have come from some outcrop of Lower Carboniferous in Upper 

 Wharfedale.) 



Now for Professor Gregory's judgment, uttered with a pontifical 

 assurance in ludicrous contrast with the enormous lacunae in his 

 data. " It is a moraine bank formed along the margin of a sheet of 

 snow and ice that filled the depression in which lies Lanshaw Dam." 



" The Delves are the remains of a moraine on the margin of an 

 embryo corrie-glacier." His tone is catching, and provokes me to 

 retort in the same tone of confidence, with this difference, 

 that I am fortified by an intimate knowledge of the whole district, 

 and of the whole length of the ridge or ridges, with many photo- 

 graphs and maps, and the concurrence of every geologist inYorkshire 

 — and they are many — who has examined the ground. 



Lanshaw Delves is a portion of the lateral moraine of a great 

 glacier that descended Wharfedale, bringing with it multitudes of 

 boulders, large and small, of Carboniferous Limestone and many 

 fragments of black crinoidal and other chert. 



In the Middle Ages, when the only road from Skipton to Lower 

 Airedale was a pack-horse track that left the valley at Uttley, near 

 Keighley, and went over the hills towards Bradford, the Lanshaw 

 Delves were the princij)al sources of lime for a large area about 

 Bingley, Shipley, etc. The lime-burners rummaged and turned 

 over the moraine in search of the limestone boulders, so that it 

 is doubtful if any part of the Lanshaw Delves segment has escaped 

 being ransacked, and it is hardly to be wondered at that Professor 

 Gregory found the summit " irregular and hummocky, sometimes 

 giving it the character of a trij)le ridge". But where was his 

 geological eye ? The depressions are in part the " Delves " (plural of 

 Delf, a place where people " dig and delve "), whence the limestone- 

 boulders were extracted, and, in part, the dismantled lime-kilns 

 themselves, of which three still remain intact. The fire-reddened 



