398 A Day ivith the Field-Clubs. 



us, and by the still greater beauty and tlie continually changing 

 variety of the prospects presented behind us by the Longmynd 

 hills as they backed the town we had left ; and some gathering 

 clouds, which threatened a thunderstorm at this moment, added 

 greatly to the beauty of the latter by the bold contrasts of light 

 and shade which were suddenly thrown over them. Passing 

 through the turnpike gate at Hazlar, a little more than a 

 mile from Church Stretton, we soon reached the village of 

 Hope Bowdler, somewhat less than a mile further. Along this 

 road the first objects of interest were occasional quarries of 

 metamorphic rocks — the ancient Caradoc sandstone altered by 

 heat ; and at Hope Bowdler we saw a layer of conglomerated 

 pebbles, water-worn, slightly stratified, but not in a horizontal 

 direction, and reposing on the highly-inclined edges of Caradoc 

 strata. Such layers are wonderfully interesting, for it is through 

 a careful study of them that we may hope to trace the history 

 of these primeval rocks and of the marvellous changes which 

 have taken place during and since their upheaval. A single 

 pebble in such a stratum tells a long history in itself. It was 

 once a component part of previously existing rocks, was torn 

 from them by the action of mighty primeval forces, was rounded 

 by rolling hither and thither on. the shores of ancient seas, and 

 was deposited at last, with other similar pebbles, in the bed in 

 which we now find it resting. During this time the rocks on 

 which we find it thus reposing were subjected to immense heat 

 and pressure, and were afterwards raised from their original 

 horizontal position into one highly inclined; and when wo 

 consider the slow progress of such operations as they are 

 effected in the present day, our minds feel confounded at the 

 contemplation of the immense periods the workings of which 

 lie thus displayed before us. 



From Hope Bowdler we turned south, by a lane which, at 

 the distance of about half a mile, brought us to the rather 

 extensive quarries of Soudley, interesting for their good display 

 of the lower Silurian fossils, but still more so as being the key- 

 note from which the wide scale of the Silurian system appears 

 to have been struck off. This quarry is worked in the upper- 

 most strata of the Caradoc sandstone, presenting a face of 

 about a hundred feet in thickness, in wln'eh beds of good free- 

 stone alternate with layers of sand, and of a softer stone, in 

 which the best fossils # are found. Upon this latter stono the 

 visitors employed their hammers very energetically, to the great 

 astonishment of the quarrymen, who were working the stone for 



y different purposes j and the former soon collected spe- 

 cimens of rare fossils, such as the diplograpsus, the simpli 

 form of tho doubly-serrated grnptolites, fossils distinctive of 

 the lower Silurian rocks, which do not vary much in 



