Chapter 29

At one spot a vertical thickness of 130 feet of this series of strata is exposed to view by a mountain torrent, and in all more than 2000 layers of clay, sand, and gravel were counted, the whole evidently accumulated under water. Some beds consist of an impalpable mud, like putty, apparently derived from the grinding down of felspar, and resembling the mud produced by the grinding action of modern glaciers.

Mr. Jamieson, when he first gave an account of this drift, inferred, in spite of the absence of marine shells, that it implied the submergence of Scotland beneath the ocean after the commencement of the glacial period, or after the era of continental ice indicated by the subjacent floor of polished and grooved rock. This conclusion would require a submergence of the land as far up as 1550 feet above the present sea-level, after which a great re-upheaval must have occurred. But the same author, having lately revisited the valley of the Tummel, suggests another possible, and I think probable, explanation of the same phenomena. The stratified drift in question is situated in a deep depression between two buttresses of rock, and if an enormous glacier be supposed to have once filled the valley of the Tummel to the height of the stratified drift, it may have dammed up the mouth of a mountain torrent by a transverse barrier, giving rise to a deep pond, in which beds of clay and sand brought down by the waters of the torrent were deposited. Charpentier in his work on the Swiss glaciers has described many such receptacles of stratified matter now in progress, and due to such blockages, and he has pointed out the remnants of ancient and similar formations left by extinct glaciers of an earlier epoch. He specially notices that angular stones of various dimensions, often polished and striated, which rest on the glacier and are let fall when the torrent undermines the side of the moving ice, descend into the small lake and become interstratified with the gravel and fine sediment brought down by the torrent into the same.*

(* Charpentier, "Essai sur les Glaciers" page 63 1841.)

The evidence of the former sojourn of the sea upon the land after the commencement of the glacial period was formerly inferred from the height to which erratic blocks derived from distant regions could be traced, besides the want of conformity in the glacial furrows to the present contours of many of the valleys. Some of these phenomena may now, as we have seen, be accounted for by assuming that there was once a crust of ice resembling that now covering Greenland.

The Grampians in Forfarshire and in Perthshire are from 3000 to 4000 feet high. To the southward lies the broad and deep valley of Strathmore, and to the south of this again rise the Sidlaw Hills to the height of 1500 feet and upwards. On the highest summits of this chain, formed of sandstone and shale, and at various elevations, I have observed huge angular fragments of mica-schist, some 3 and others 15 feet in diameter, which have been conveyed for a distance of at least 15 miles from the nearest Grampian rocks from which they could have been detached. Others have been left strewed over the bottom of the large intervening vale of Strathmore.*

(* "Proceedings of the Geological Society" volume 3 page 344.)

It may be argued that the transportation of such blocks may have been due not to floating ice, but to a period when Strathmore was filled up with land ice, a current of which extended from the Perthshire Highlands to the summit of the Sidlaw Hills, and the total absence of marine or freshwater shells from all deposits, stratified or unstratified, which have any connection with these erratics in Forfarshire and Perthshire may be thought to favour such a theory.

But the same mode of transport can scarcely be imagined for those fragments of mica-schist, one of them weighing from 8 to 10 tons, which were observed much farther south by Mr. Maclaren on the Pentland Hills, near Edinburgh, at the height of 1100 feet above the sea, the nearest mountain composed of this formation being 50 miles distant.*

(* Maclaren, "Geology of Fife" etc. page 220.)

On the same hills, also, at all elevations, stratified gravels occur which, although devoid of shells, it seems hardly possible to refer to any but a marine origin.

Although I am willing, therefore, to concede that the glaciation of the Scotch mountains, at elevations exceeding 2000 feet, may be explained by land ice, it seems difficult not to embrace the conclusion that a subsidence took place not merely of 500 or 600 feet, as demonstrated by the marine shells, but to a much greater amount, as shown by the present position of erratics and some patches of stratified drift. The absence of marine shells at greater heights than 525 feet above the sea, will be treated of in a future chapter. It may in part, perhaps, be ascribed to the action of glaciers, which swept out marine strata from all the higher valleys, after the re-emergence of the land.

LATEST CHANGES PRODUCED BY GLACIERS IN SCOTLAND.

We may next consider the state of Scotland after its emergence from the glacial sea, when we cannot fail to be approaching the time when Man co-existed with the mammoth and other mammalia now extinct. In a paper which I published in 1840, on the ancient glaciers of Forfarshire, I endeavoured to show that some of these existed after the mountains and glens had acquired precisely their present shape,* and had left moraines even in the minor valleys, just where they would now leave them were the snow and ice again to gain ground.

(* "Proceedings of the Geological Society" volume 3 page 337.)

I described also one remarkable transverse mound, evidently the terminal moraine of a retreating glacier, which crosses the valley of the South Esk, a few miles above the point where it issues from the Grampians, and about 6 miles below the Kirktown of Clova. Its central part, at a place called Glenarm, is 800 feet above the level of the sea. The valley is about half a mile broad, and is bounded by steep and lofty mountains, but immediately above the transverse barrier it expands into a wide alluvial plain, several miles broad, which has evidently once been a lake. The barrier itself, about 150 feet high, consists in its lower part of till with boulders, 50 feet thick, precisely resembling the moraine of a Swiss glacier, above which there is a mass of stratified sand, varying in thickness from 50 to 100 feet, which has the appearance of consisting of the materials of the moraine rearranged in a stratified form, possibly by the waters of a glacier lake. The structure of the barrier has been laid open by the Esk, which has cut through it a deep passage about 400 yards wide.

I have also given an account of another striking feature in the physical geography of Perthshire and Forfarshire, which I consider to belong to the same period; namely, a continuous zone of boulder clay, forming ridges and mounds from 50 to 70 feet high (the upper part of the mounds usually stratified), enclosing numerous lakes, some of them several miles long, and many ponds and swamps filled with shell-marl and peat. This band of till, with Grampian boulders and associated river-gravel, may be traced continuously for a distance of 34 miles, with a width of 3 1/2 miles, from near Dunkeld, by Coupar, to the south of Blairgowrie, then through the lowest part of Strathmore, and afterwards in a straight line through the greatest depression in the Sidlaw Hills, from Forfar to Lunan Bay.

Although no great river now takes its course through this line of ancient lakes, moraines, and river gravel, yet it evidently marks an ancient line by which, first, a great glacier descended from the mountains to the sea, and by which, secondly, at a later period, the principal water drainage of this country was effected. The subsequent modification in geography is comparable in amount to that which has taken place since the higher level gravels of the valley of the Somme were formed, or since the Belgian caves were filled with mud and bone-breccia.

(FIGURE 35. OVAL AND FLATTISH PEBBLES IN DESERTED CHANNELS.)

Mr. Jamieson has remarked, in reference to this and some other extinct river-channels of corresponding date, that we have the means of ascertaining the direction in which the waters flowed by observing the arrangement of the oval and flattish pebbles in their deserted channels; for in the bed of a fast-flowing river such pebbles are seen to dip towards the current, as represented in Figure 35, such being the position of greatest resistance to the stream.*

(* Jamieson, "Quarterly Journal of the Geological Society"