84 THE GEOLOGY OE THE BERWICK COAST LINE 



notice something remarkable here. He will ask how it is 

 that the carboniferous rocks, which are much later and 

 newer than the Silurian, and therefore ought to overlie 

 them, are here actually beneath them. The explanation is 

 "a fault"; that is, at some very remote period, during some 

 tremendous local convulsion of the earth's crust, the whole 

 of the carboniferous strata, from Burnmouth to Berwick 

 nearly, were dislocated, slipped, or faulted down below the 

 Silurian. Indeed, so clearly is this the case that the division 

 between the two sorts of rock — the "line of fault" as it is 

 called — can in many places be clearly traced. Unless all 

 that is accepted, the geology of this part of the coast will 

 be a permanent puzzle ; and what complicates that more is 

 that, just as in our social or municipal system we find 

 " wheels within wheels," so here we find " faults within 

 faults," there being, besides the principal, main one, included 

 within it several minor or secondary faults, which are most 

 distracting and annoying, and seem to have been put there 

 on purpose to puzzle and vex the geological ty^o. For 

 instance, the banks of Dodds's Well Rifle Eange, or Burgess' 

 Gove Bay, are due to a secondary fault, of which the line 

 can be seen at either end. But our student will want to 

 know something more. He will say — When I get up to 

 and beyond the rail, and wander about Halidon Hill and 

 Lamberton, I find nothing but Silurian, unmistakeable 

 metamorphic Silurian, which looks like what it is — baked 

 sediment. What has become of all that vast accumulation, 

 hundreds of feet at the least, of sedimentary strata, which 

 must have covered this Silurian ; I mean the old red and 

 carboniferous systems, so much of which I still find to the 

 north and south ? The answer this time is : Denudation. 

 They have been washed away by water and ice long ages 

 ago, though little bits have been left here and there, which 

 show that it must have been so. Coal is found lingering 

 on the sides of Cheviot. At Jedburgh is an old coal pit 



