17© Proc. B. N. F. C, 



ever, the clay was itself a feature of interest, being more than 

 usually full of ice -polished stones, from the massive boulder of 

 basalt weighing several tons, to the small hand specimen of 

 Antrim chalk that recorded plainly the direction in which the 

 ice-movement must have travelled. Passing round by Killy- 

 nether House, the party made their way to the top of the hill, 

 and most of them to the summit of the tower, the view from 

 which nearly, if not quite, equals that from the adjacent Helen's 

 Tower, celebrated in Laureate's verse. The clearness of the 

 day allowed full justice to the panorama, which embraced 

 Cantyre, the rugged summits of Arran, Ailsa Craig, the long 

 stretch of the Scottish coast backed by the Ayrshire mountains, 

 Galloway, the Isle of Man, and the whole extent of the County 

 Down, with the broad, level sands of Strangford Lough. The 

 scene to the geologist is particularly interesting. The undula- 

 tions of rock of lower Silurian age, which forms almost the 

 entire of the county, may be looked upon as a floor, upon the 

 upturned and contorted strata of which are scattered patches 

 of more recent formations that must have covered the silurian 

 beds for ages, until a vast process of denudation has swept away 

 the newer to bring the older once more to light. The oldest of 

 these perhaps is the little patch of Carboniferous limestone at 

 Castle Espie, and the still smaller patch of Carboniferous shale 

 and limestone at Cultra. There is the narrow strip, only seen 

 at low water, of the Permian or magnesian limestone also at 

 Cultra, and there is this outlier of Triassic sandstone that forms 

 the bulk of Scrabo Hill, which in itself is capped by the vastly 

 more recent outlier of basalt from the great volcanic plateau of 

 Antrim. As we have seen again, the flanks of the hill are 

 buried beneath a considerable thickness of the Boulder Clay, 

 which lies as a recent covering upon all the formations alike, 

 and whose parent ice had no inconsiderable share in moulding 

 the features of the country as we now know it. The sandstones 

 of Scrabo are generally supposed to belong to the lower Triassic 

 beds— the Bunter-sandslein of Germany. The grounds for this 



