354 Mr Hardy on Langleyford Vale and the Cheviots. 



the dependents that clustered round it ; to meet whose 

 spiritual necessities, the church or chapel was afterwards 

 constructed, and fixed a population for the future. 



A short distance from the town, during recent improve- 

 ments in the Earle fields, many large blocks of white or 

 yellow sandstone and grey limestone of fresh-water origin 

 (Tuedian) have been extracted, along with other "earth- 

 fasts " of hill-porphyry. Both sandstones and limestones 

 enclose fossils, of which Calamites and Stigmaria are the most 

 noticeable. The sandstone contains green-earth and scales 

 of mica, and the quartz granules are minute : differing from 

 the Whiteside sandstones, in respect that the latter shew no 

 mica, and include large fragments of quartz, as if derived 

 from the debris of an ancient quartzose rock. There is pro- 

 bably a junction with the Tuedian on, the outcrop of the 

 porphyry, overlaid by the drift ; for I found a loose block of 

 porphyry with a fragment of this sandstone mortised into a 

 hollow in its centre. Drifted pieces of the sandstone are 

 frequent in the clay scaurs above Earle Mill, and particularly 

 in one opposite Haugh-head; large blocks are scattered in 

 the channel of Wooler water, below Caldgate Mill, and a 

 large one at the junction of Old Middleton dean with the 

 Caldgate valley. Several rolled fractions of it, of a green 

 colour, are visible in a bed of gravel mostly porphyritic, 

 firmly jammed into the interstices of the newer sandstone 

 rocks of Whiteside. Occasionally also, of a yellow tint, they 

 occur in the thick assemblage of gravel, sand, and clay on the 

 high bank to the east of Careburn bridge ; but that deposit, 

 which has undergone subaqueous re-arrangement, appears 

 never to have extended farther up, for we find none on the west 

 side, although the boulder- clay itself in its crude condition 

 is spread over all the hills. We are probably here on the 

 shores of an old sea, or, rather, as there are no marine shells 

 present, of a great fresh-water lake ; and the latter condition 

 consists best with the appearance of the laminated and slowly 

 deposited unfossiliferous sills in the valley of the Till, farther 

 down. There are again fragments of this peculiar sandstone 

 and limestone in the deep clay beds above South Middleton 

 dean, where porphyries predominate at present. The Tued- 

 ian formation may have been originally shallow ; but it is 

 evident that it has undergone vast denudation. A large 

 sandstone block is said to lie on the moorland height above 



