﻿562 MR. A. WILMORE ON THE CARBONIFEROUS [Nov. I9IO, 



The great Elbolton Knoll is part of a dissected anticline, in 

 which there are subsidiary folds and faults (just as similar subsidiary 

 folds and faults complicate, for instance, the Rain Hall anticline). 

 On the south side the Pendleside Shales are seen dipping off the 

 limestone mass ; on the north side the dip-slope is a comparatively 

 gentle one, and extends nearly to the Wharfe, a distance of half a 

 mile. Here again the Pendleside Shales, with their characteristic 

 fossils, are seen at several places, dipping northwards. Swinden is 

 also a disturbed and complex anticlinal fold, dissected by erosion 

 somewhat irregularly. It is separated from Elbolton by a valley 

 which is now full of alluvium, and in which is the silted-up lake- 

 bed previously mentioned. It is, however, significant that shales 

 of Pendleside type were cut through in one part of the western 

 end of the valley in the making of the Dales Railway. It is thus 

 probable that the valley along which that railway now passes, from 

 Ttylstone Station to the neighbourhood of Catchall Inn, is a former 

 synclinal fold which ended abruptly against the fault at Linton, 

 just as the obvious folds do all along that fault. 



The Butterhaw, Garden, and Skelterton knolls are obviously 

 partly separated portions of the same general mass of limestone. 

 The transverse streams which separate them show limestone 

 similar to that of which the knolls are composed ; and, in the lower 

 land in the immediate neighbourhood, as already pointed out, there 

 are numerous exposures of the same beds of limestone. Minor 

 folds again introduce complications, as in the case of those in 

 Threapland Gill, already described. 



The knolls continue eastwards, across tho Wharfe ; it is, indeed, 

 most instructive to stand on the top of Elbolton and to see how the 

 line of rounded limestone hills continues in a modified form to the 

 grit hills beyond Skyreholme. There is a striking likeness in the 

 series as seen thus from Elbolton, beginning with that hill and 

 following to Keal Hill, Hartlington liaikes, and on to Appletreewick 

 Hill. They are the same general limestone, part of the same 

 general anticlinal fold, but dissected into several masses by the 

 Wharfe and its tributaries. 



In the eastern part of the district, the beds, as will be pointed 

 out later, are quite evenly bedded ; this has already been shown to 

 be the case in the western part. There is less disturbance, too, in 

 the nature of the folding and faulting, though the beds are by no 

 means free from it. In the middle part of the district now included 

 as the knoll region, the folding and the faulting, as well as the 

 ' coarseness ' of the bedding of the limestone, seem to have attained 

 their maximum. Here, consequently, are found the most remarkable 

 knolls : Elbolton, Stebden, Butterhaw, and Swinden. 



It is not without significance that precisely at this point the 

 Wharfe leaves the ' tabular ' country of the Craven Highlands, with 

 its almost horizontal limestone strata, and cuts its way across the 

 fault and the anticline of Linton and Burnsall already mentioned. 

 High-level drifts — apparently river drifts — of enormous dimensions 

 abound here, and there has evidently been rapid river-erosion and 



