PRE CARBONIFEROUS ROCKS OF CHARNWOOD FOREST. 773 



crest of High Towers, where also, as we shall see, are breccias, 

 including slate. 



The line of this section protracted passes through an outcrop near 

 Charley Wood. It is an isolated narrow ridge by a farm-house. 

 The dip is clearly indicated by colour stripes as 55° to S.W. by S. ; 

 the rock is much decomposed and stained, but appears to be partly an 

 ash, if not an agglomerate, in a siliceous matrix, partly a siliceous grit, 

 partly a rather well-cleft slate showing minute stripes of bedding. 

 The ash is mottled, rather like the BensclifT beds ; the grit and slate 

 are greyish, with peculiar red stains from infiltration. The ash is 

 at the north end, the slate at the south. The slate seems to underlie 

 the grit. 



13. For the next section (fig. 4) we may start from the cross roads 

 near High Towers, where stands theForest Kock Hotel. At the corner 

 of the lanes is a pinkish indurated slate, better seen in a quarry a 

 few yards off. Here we find a series of grits and exceedingly fine- 

 grained slates, highly altered so as to resemble a hornstone, with 

 splintery conchoidal fracture. The lowest bed is the most compact. 

 Its colour is dark slaty blue, weathering white or pink. Under the 

 microscope it appears to be composed of very minute fragments of 

 felspar, part of the matrix remaining dark with crossed prisms, 

 perhaps owing to the minuteness of the fragments ; while there are 

 scattered in it small crystals seldom more than -002 inch in diameter 

 of felspar, apparently fragmental, both orthoclase and plagioclase, 

 with a little iron oxide and a few minute epidote crystals. The beds 

 dip W.S.W. at about 15°. Similar beds are seen, much jointed and 

 broken, about 100 yards up the lane towards the north. 



In a spinney west of the cross lanes is found first a dark grit 

 with quartz grains and felspar crystals, rather cut up with veins, 

 and not showing its bedding ; this we have not seen again in the 

 neighbourhood ; next some whitish ashy slates and grits with rather 

 variable indications of dip, usually about west, and seeming to pass 

 under the indurated slates last named. 



The wild moorland of High Towers affords numerous but rather 

 disconnected outcrops of rock. The first, just beyond the spinney, 

 shows a dip of 60°. Its highest visible bed is a large breccia, whose 

 matrix is green slate ; the included fragments are large and very 

 various in material. One rock weathers a uniform pink ; another 

 is a mottled, highly altered rock, with some resemblance to a syenite, 

 not improbably a felsite with epidote. Some are fragments of a 

 dark purple porphyritic rock, which, as will be seen, is common in 

 this neighbourhood. There are also quartzites and slates. 



Passing S.E. along the ridge in the line of strike we repeatedly 

 find this breccia containing great fragments of banded slate, so 

 large and so contorted that an unaccustomed observer might not 

 recognize the fact of brecciation. One imbedded piece near the 

 south end of the ridge is about six feet long by three deep. At this 

 end there are also fragments of a highly indurated apple-green flinty 

 slate. The matrix is extremely variable, in parts much mottled, but 

 more usually a green gritty ash. At this end a fine indurated slate 



Q. J. U.S. No. 132. 3e 



