352: PROCEEDINGS OP THE GEOLOGICAL SOCIETY. [Feb. 28, 



account of their size, the very distinct character of their parent rock, 

 and the fact of their having found their way into Yorkshire over a 

 part of the Pennine Chain, 1500 feet above the sea-level. There is 

 a kind of granite now quarried at Dalbeattie, on the west side of 

 Criffell, which may occasionallybe found in drift a great distance to the 

 S.S.E. This granite contains large oblong brown crystals of felspar, 

 and might easily be mistaken for Shapfell granite by one not familiar 

 with the latter * ; but in Westmoreland and Yorkshire there would 

 be little chance of such a mistake occurring. The base and sides of 

 Wasdale Crag (from which the granite boulders radiated) are more 

 or less covered with very compact pinnel packed full of rounded and 

 glaciated boulders of granite and dark metamorphic felstone. These 

 boulders, however, are seldom very large. On the surface of the 

 pinnel, and more or less associated with a thin covering of red loam and 

 angular debris, there are many very large angular or subangular blocks. 

 On walking from Shap to the Shap-summit Granite Works, I saw a 

 block about 12 feet in average diameter, and was credibly informed 

 that there was a block high up on the side of a neighbouring hill 

 which measured 20 x 15 x 5 feet. Split blocks are not uncommon in 

 the district. The number of scattered blocks for many miles to the 

 E., N.E., and IS", of Wasdale Crag must have been enormous before 

 their utilization as the foundations of stone walls ; and they are 

 still sufficiently numerous to arrest the attention of the railway- 

 traveller. It is well known that there is a very erratic Wasdale-Crag 

 boulder in Darlington ; and there is a silly paradoxical saying connected 

 with it — namely, that " it turns round wben it strikes one." This 

 saying I have found to be associated with several boulders in other 

 parts of England. The numerous Wasdale-Crag boulders I found 

 around Milnthorpe (and they are well known to be common near 

 Kendal) must have come along a route quite as unexpected as the 

 march over Stainmoor ; but the most way wardly erratic of all the 

 boulders from the Shapfell centre of dispersion would appear to be 

 one observed by Mr. Green, P.G.S., in the village of Eoyston near 

 Barnsley ! 



Cumberland. — Near Stainton, in the neighbourhood of Penrith, at 

 the base of a hummocky deposit of clay which is overlain by sand 

 and gravel, there is an instance of what may often be seen elsewhere — 

 namely, a number of large, rough, and angular boulders (limestone), 

 which look as if they bad been forcibly uprooted from the underlying 

 limestone rock and speedily covered up. On the right-hand side of 

 the road from Penrith to Greystoke, a boulder, 6| x 6 x 4 feet, stands 

 on end in a field. It is a very coarse felspathic breccia, some of the 

 included fragments reaching 1 foot in diameter f. 



In the interior of the Lake district many boulders cease to be 



* The so-called Shapfell boulder, about twelve miles north of Cheltenham, 

 referred to in Professor Ramsay's ' Physical Geology and Geography of Great 

 Britain,' p. 155 (third edition), may possibly be Criffell. 



t The'main part of this paper has teen written for the first time ; but several 

 references to boulders already noticed by the author in the ' Geological Magazine ' 

 are included for the sake of connexion. 



