396 
The Muscle Band Ironstone is more extensive than the 
Low Moor bed, and can be traced over a tract of country 
of at least fifteen miles in length, extending from Flockton 
to Tankersley Park, near Wentworth House. It, however, 
is variable in thickness, and when thickest " sets up" 
fifteen inches, and yields about 1,200 tons per acre. 
The Ironstone above the Swallow Wood Coal extends 
from Tankersley Park to near Flockton ; it is remarkable 
for being interrupted in its course for miles together by a 
sandstone, which, however, has the iron disseminated through 
it as may be seen at Darton station, where the Swallow 
Wood Coal is in the cutting, with a heavy red and brown 
rock roof, but no Ironstone in balls can be found. This bed 
"sets up" about seven inches, and would yield about 600 tons 
per acre. The Ironstones of the coal district, therefore, 
average from 600 to 1,200 tons per acre, are sometimes 
intercepted in their course, and are not nearly co-extensive 
with the coal seams that accompany them. 
In 1848, 1 was asked by a friend of Mr. Osbaldeston's to go 
to Ebberstone Lodge, in the vale of Pickering, about ten miles 
west of Scarborough, to ascertain if there was any proba- 
bility of finding coal, as there was a bore-hole then being made 
and which was 140 yards deep. The borers had already 
found at forty-three yards deep, a coal of two feet thick, but 
knowing that the true coal series must, upon the Oolite, 
which is itself 600 yards thick, be at least 1,000 yards deep, 
and that the thin coal seams in the Oolite itself are very 
inferior in quality, and could only be worth working when 
near the surface, I was about to request the bore-hole to be 
abandoned, when the men asked me to go about four miles to 
inspect an Ironstone, six feet thick, recently found in a por- 
tion of the Ebberstone Estate, which had then just been sold. 
Being very incredulous about an Ironstone mine existing of 
