Border Country of Salop and North Wales ; ^c. 253 



Bromwich. In the Pits N° I, the Broach Coal is 60 yards from the surface 

 and about 1 yard thick. 56 yards lower is the Main Coal, which is, as usual, 

 10 yards thick. The dip of the strata in this and some adjoininij collieries is 

 towards the north-west, and amounts to 3 or 4 inches in the yard. The fact 

 thus ascertained respecting the dip of the strata in this situation is subversive 

 of the argument for the imagined extension of the coal eastward under the 

 red sandstone, which has been founded upon a comparison of the dip of the 

 strata at the base of the Dudley Hills with their dip in the Warwickshire coal- 

 field near Atherstone and Nuneaton. 



Besides the chain of hills which I have already described, another may be 

 traced of a similar character, though of very inferior elevation. It is not con- 

 tinuous, and in most places it is very much altered by decomposition. The 

 indications of its existence, which I have observed, are as follows. Barrow 

 Hill is situated more than half-way from Dudley to King's Swinford on the 

 right hand of the road. Its interior has been in a great measure worked out, 

 and now presents extensive and picturesque excavations. It consists of green- 

 stone, resembling that of Salisbury Craigs, very fine-grained, and containing 

 small crystals of augite. This is accompanied by basalt, which, from its lustre, 

 resembles the Arran pitchstone, but differs from it in being softer, and in 

 yielding a gray streak, and a black, but not porous enamel. The greenstone 

 also includes irregularly-formed globular masses of variously coloured wacke, 

 and veins of calcareous spar, both rhomboidal and fibrous, with quartz, horn- 

 stone, and sulphate of barytes in long six-sided tables. 



The hilly cultivated ground extending from Barrow Hill to Brierly Hill 

 seems to be of the same formation. At Brierly Hill the greenstone is distinctly 

 seen by the road side near the chapel. Pursuing the line of these hills across 

 some lower ground, we come to a stratified mass of limestone of the same na- 

 ture with that of the Dudley Hills. It occurs at a place called "the Hayes " 

 in the hamlet of Lye Waste, and forms a narrow broken ridge of small extent, 

 rising very abruptly from beneath successive beds of slate-clay, coal, clay con- 

 taining balls of ironstone, and a friable substance abounding in pebbles of 

 quartz-rock of various sizes, which seems to be a decomposed greenstone. 

 This substance forms a gritty soil, distinguished by specks of a dirty white 

 and others of a greenish gray, and it may be traced from the Cradley toll-bar 

 to the Lye Waste*. Near the last-mentioned place it incloses pebbles of 



* Beds of trap-tufif are found along the course of the river Stour at Overend near Cradley, and 

 the whole country between Overend and the Lye Waste probably belongs to the trap formation. 

 The same rock rises from under the red sandstone on the declivity of the hill to the east of Hales, 

 owen, between that place and Belle Vue. 



