444 



MR. BEENARD SMITH ON THE 



[Sept. 1912, 



deposits to the south, and was probably formed as a delta in a 

 lake held up b}^ ice crossing the estuary-mouth. A pit shows over 

 8 feet of finely -laminated and slightly false-bedded sands and silts, 



containing small pebbles of granite 

 and sandstone measuring up to 

 3 inches in greatest diameter. The 

 coarse boulder-, sand-, and gravel- 

 beds of variegated tints, exposed in 

 a quarry near the vicarage at the 

 mouth of the Gill-Scar channel, 

 three-quarters of a mile north of 

 Millom Castle, are of a different 

 origin, and the sandy layers consist 

 of other than Triassic material; 

 they may, however, have been de- 

 posited in the same sheet of water. 

 In one of the top layers I found 

 a small boulder of rotten biotite- 

 granite, which may have come 

 down the Gill-Scar Channel from 

 the Whicham-Yalley Lake. 



The water accumulated in front 

 of the ice crossing the Duddon 

 Estuary must have escaped some- 

 where to the south along the coast- 

 line of Furness, where signs of its 

 passage may one day be found. 



It would also be interesting to 

 determine whether (as I suspect) 

 the accumulations of sand and 

 gravel in the mouth of Eskdale, 

 the St. Bees Yalley, and other 

 valleys in the intervening tract of 

 country, were deposited while the 

 Irish-Sea ice was holding up extra- 

 morainic lakes in these valleys. 



Mellard Eeade described Marine 

 Drift [sic'] in Eskdale and Miter- 

 dale^ as occurring up to a height 

 of 400 feet above sea-level, pebbles 

 of St. Bees Sandstone being found 

 as high up as 320 feet. In Miterdale they are found 2 to 3 miles 

 up the valley from their nearest outcrop,^ and as much as 4 miles 

 up Eskdale. (In the Whicham Valley they are more than 2 miles 

 from its mouth.) If there were lakes in these valleys, some of their 

 overflow waters may have taken a share in cutting the marginal 

 channels north of Bootle. 



^ 'Eskdale Drift, & its Bearing on Glacial Geology' Geol. Mag. dec. 3, 

 vol. X (1893) p. 19. 2 ji^i^^ p, 14, 



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