Why are Skiddaw and several of the hills in the north of Lakeland rounded in contour and possessed of no precipices worthy the name? What accounts for the cliffs and jagged outlines of the Langdale Pikes, the Pillar, or Scawfell? Wherefore all the various beautiful and retiring dales and side valleys, and, most pregnant question of all, whence came the Lakes themselves? No appreciative or thoughtful visitor but must have pondered upon these things and been somewhat puzzled. Many, I know, have dismissed the matter by concluding that the whole district is due to some vast upheaval of bygone ages. No such simple explanation will cover all the facts. The earliest causes of Lakeland were complex and various. It has several times been submerged beneath the sea, when layer upon layer of mud and sediment was deposited to the thickness of thousands of feet. Skiddaw, Saddleback and others of our Northern fells are composed of these layers of soft rock. Weathering processes have rounded their contours and left to them the graceful flowing outlines which we now admire. Volcanoes also have played no unimportant part. Violent eruptions took place near Keswick and to the south of it and ejected material--boulders, huge masses of rock and fine dust--the greater part of which fell again almost vertically and deposited rock to the depth of at least twelve thousand feet. This has since been exposed to climatic influences, and been greatly reduced in bulk. The mountains of Borrowdale, Scawfell and Great Gable, amongst others, are formed of this volcanic _débris_; hence their hard, jagged and precipitous nature. A great part of them was ejected from Castle Head, the favourite view-point above Keswick, which is beyond doubt the crater of an extinct volcano.