they could steal round the ridge and so escape outwards to the Atlantic.
This being the case, we have a very simple and obvious explanation of
the absence of Skye rocks in the till of the Long Island. One sees
readily enough that the sub-glacial débris dragged across the Minch
would naturally be carried away to south-west and north-east by the
"under-tow" or deflected ice. It is quite impossible that any Skye
fragments or bits of rock from the mainland could travel over the bed
of the Minch, and then be pushed up the precipitous rock wall of the
Long Island. There is only one place in all the Outer Hebrides where
we might expect to meet with extraneous boulders in the till, and
that is in the north of Lewis, where the land shelves gently into the
sea, and the great rocky ridge terminates. Here the under-strata of
the ice would begin to steal up upon the land, favoured by its gentle
inclination, and in that very place accordingly we meet with a deposit
of till in which are found many boulders of a hard red sandstone, and
some of various porphyries which are quite alien to the Long Island.
Moreover, the till itself in that locality is much more of a clay than
the usual sub-glacial débris in other parts of Lewis, and contains
numerous fragments of sea-shells. All this is quite in keeping with the
other evidence. The extreme north end of Lewis was overflowed by the
under-current that crept up the bed of the Minch, hugging the Hebridean
ridge, and dragging along with it a muddy mass interspersed with the
shells and other marine exuviæ that lay in its path, and numerous
stones, some of which may have come from Skye, while others were
derived from the mainland.
I have already said enough, perhaps, about the abrasion of the
Hebrides, but I may add a few words upon the origin of the freshwater
lakes. Many of these rest in complete rock-basins; others, again, seem
to lie partly upon solid rock and partly upon till; while yet others
appear to occupy mere shallow depressions in the surface of the till.
All of them thus owe their origin to the action of the ice-sheet. As
one might have expected, the great majority lie along the outcrop of
the gneissic strata, which, as a rule, corresponds pretty closely to
the flow of the ice. Hence the general trend of the lakes is from
south-east to north-west. In many cases in fashioning these rock-basins
the ice has merely deepened in an irregular manner previously existing
hollows, which are now, of course, filled with water. In not a few
places, however, the lakes are drawn out in other directions--this
being due usually to changes in the strike or outcrop of the strata.
For example, over a considerable district in the south of Lewis many
lake-hollows extend from south-west to north-east, or at right angles
to the direction of the ice-flow. Such lakes are usually dammed up at
one or both extremities by glacial débris.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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