HISTORY OF THE BROWNEY VALLEY 453 



Lias through all the jeons of the Oolite, Chalk, and Tertiary 

 formations up to to-day, and all through that vast period the 

 general contour of our county has been as it is now : its 

 highlands have been in the west and its lowlands in the east, 

 therefore its valleys have been approximately as now ; and 

 much of the Browney Valley is pre-glacial. Of course all the 

 valleys have been infinitely varied as the wear and tear of 

 these countless ages have gradually stripped off our great 

 anticlinal of the Pennines the many thousands of feet which 

 constitute the Triassic and Permian rocks ; and then have 

 scoured out the present valleys in the deeper and older 

 Carboniferous rocks, of which valleys our little Browney 

 -Valley is one. The records of these ages are up above the 

 clouds, irrecoverably lost. 



Not so however with the records of later times. They are 

 with us, and it is our aim to hunt them out and spell out the 

 fascinating story they have to tell. 



They tell us that not only is the Browney a most ancient 

 river, infinitely older than Thames or Severn or Trent, but 

 they tell us a considerable amount of details, at least during 

 and since that last Glacial Age which may be said to have 

 introduced with " Drift Man " modern times. And though 

 this may only cover some 75,000 years, yet even that may be 

 considered enough to justify us in describing the Browney as 

 an ancient river, although this period is in its complete life 

 history only as the tick of a clock in the life of a man. 



It is my privilege to introduce some of these records to you 

 and to help you to read them. 



To do this effectively we propose to limit our attention to 

 one group of records, those afforded by morainic matter. 



The deltaic remains at the mouth of the Derwent by 

 Blaydon ; the picturesque cliffs and deserted watercourse of 

 Howen's Gill by Consett; the ancient river bed of the Browney 

 revealed in the Langley Park and Bearpark pits below the 

 Busty coal-seam, might with equal propriety and interest have 

 been chosen, for they all combine to tell the same story; but 

 to-night our choice falls on that great deposit of morainic 



