Report of Meetings for 1 890. By Dr J. Hardy 



23 



drew attention to a particularly fine glaciated rock, from which 

 apparently there had been qnarried in the distant centuries a 

 huge mass of stone, probably to be used in milling. At this 

 juncture the members of the party grouped themselves in leisurelj^ 

 attitudes upon the heather whilst Mr Tait read a brief and pithy 

 address " On the Geology of the District, with a special reference 

 to its Glacial features." In the course of these remarks, it was 

 stated that the general dip of the strata was to the east and 

 south-east, so that as they walked west or north-westward they 

 were always coming on the outcrop of lower formations. As a 

 rule these culminate on the verge of that ring of hills which 

 encircle the valleys of the A In, the Breamish, and the Till, 

 excellent examples of which they had on view in the Beanley, 

 Harehope, and Old Bewick Hills, and away, highest of all, Eass 

 Castle. These hills are for the most part Gritty Sandstone. 

 The great Limestones of the coast do not approach the district, 

 though very good beds are found to the east of Eass Castle at 

 Quarryhouse; and only at Tarry and Bannamoor, and Curlshugh 

 and Shipley to the north are found beds of Coal, the best of 

 which are about two feet in thickness. One other mineral 

 might be mentioned — Iron. Eeferring to the Glacial Age, he 

 said that what Greenland now is the British Islands, and, indeed, 

 the continent of Europe, once were. He spoke of the Glacial 

 Age as an accepted fact, just as it was accepted that there was a 

 Silurian, a Devonian, or a Carboniferous Age, and it occurred 

 in this part of the northern hemisphere, in the latest of the great 

 creative periods of the earth, the Saturday — if it might be so 

 termed — of the great creation week. Long before it began, it 

 was thought the valley of the Breamish did not exist, but that 

 the strata which terminate so abruptly with the encircling hills 

 were continued across to the flanks of the volcanic Cheviots— if 

 they did not overtop it. But the sure and slow process of nature, 

 operating through boundless time, so acted in denuding and 

 breaking up the structure and bearing it to lower levels, that on 

 the advent of the Glacial Age, it found the valley systems in a 

 certain degree as we now find them, but it has certainly made 

 them broader and deeper, and rounded off many surfaces in an 

 unmistakable manner. All the conditions under which glaciated 

 stones were found in the district were what they might expect 

 to find in keeping with the theory of the great ice flow. Its 

 great centre of gathering was on the Scandinavian continent, 



