Vol. 51.] THE WHITEHAVEN SANDSTONE SEEIES. 235 



19. The Whitehaven Sandstone Series. 

 By J. D. Kendall, Esq., E.G.S. (Read February 20th, 1895.) 



[Abstract.] 



The Whitehaven Sandstone, with its associated shales, is a purple- 

 grey deposit sometimes having a thickness of 500 or 600 feet. 

 The Author gives details of a large number of sections of the series, 

 which also contains thin coal-seams and occasionally Spirorlris- 

 limestone. 



He combats the view that it is stained Middle Coal Measure 

 deposit, and gives his reasons for believing that it rests uncon- 

 formably upon the Middle Coal Measures, and also that it has not 

 received its colour by abstraction of colouring-matter from the 

 Permian beds, but that the colour actually belongs to the deposit. 

 He describes sections which lead him to suppose that the deposit 

 has a wider distribution over the Cumbrian district than is allowed 

 by previous writers. 



Discussion. 



Mr. T. Y. Holmes believed that geologists had always acknow- 

 ledged the unconformability of the Whitehaven Sandstone, at 

 Whitehaven, to the beds on which it rested. The difficulty was to 

 identify it in other places. In the Yorkshire Coalfield, where he 

 had worked on the Geological Survey before going to Cumberland, 

 the Red Rock of Rotherham was analogous in position to the 

 Whitehaven Sandstone. But the Yorkshire Coalfield was almost 

 entirely free from Glacial Drift, and the Coal Measure sandstones, 

 excepting the Red Rock, were invariably buff or brown in colour. 

 It was therefore possible to trace the Red Rock of Rotherham from 

 place to place, and to note its relations to the ordinary conformable 

 Coal Measure rocks. Yet the country occupied by the Coal 

 Measures and Permian-Triassic rocks in Cumberland was not only 

 almost wholly drift-covered, but the surface-features were drift- 

 features, and the streams and sea-cliffs often showed nothing but 

 drift for many miles continuously. In addition, rocks like the 

 Whitehaven Sandstone, of purple-grey tint, could be seen on every 

 Carboniferous horizon from the Carboniferous Limestone upwards, 

 and were visible on the rivers Esk, Liddel, and Line, on the 

 Scottish Border, as well as in the streams of Western Cumberland. 

 It was therefore obviously impossible to trace the Whitehaven 

 Sandstone across the country, or to assume that a certain rock, 

 miles away from Whitehaven, was the Whitehaven Sandstone on 

 the mere evidence of its appearance. In 1883, Mr. Kendall read a 

 paper on ' The Structure of the Cumberland Coalfield ' at a meeting 

 of the North of Engl. Inst. Min. Eng., which was published in 

 the Proceedings of that Society (vol. xxxii.). In this paper the 

 Whitehaven Sandstone, and its identification in certain localities, 

 was fully discussed. He (the speaker) had pointed out in a short 



