The Southern Uplands.--The northern margin of this wide division having
already been defined, we may now proceed to examine the distribution
of its mountain-masses. Before doing so, however, it may be as well
to point out that considerable tracts in Tweeddale, Teviotdale, and
Liddesdale, together with the Cheviot Hills, do not properly belong
to the Southern Uplands. In fact, the Cheviots bear the same relation
to those Uplands as the Northern Heights do to the Highlands. Like
them they are separated by a broad hollow from the Uplands, which they
face--a hollow that reaches its greatest extent in Tweeddale, and
rapidly wedges out to south-west, where the Cheviots abut abruptly
on the Uplands. Even where this abrupt contact takes place, however,
the different configuration of the two regions would enable any
geologist to separate the one set of mountains from the other. But for
geographical purposes we may conveniently disregard these geological
contrasts, and include within the Southern Uplands all the area lying
between the Central Lowlands and the English Border.
If there are no mountains in the Highlands so grouped and arranged as
to be properly termed "ranges," this is not less true of the Southern
Uplands. Perhaps it is the appearance which those Uplands present when
viewed from the Central Lowlands that first suggested the notion that
they were ranges. They seem to rise like a wall out of the low grounds
at their base, and extend far as eye can reach in an approximately
straight line. It seems more probable, however, that our earlier
cartographers merely meant, by their conventional hill-shading, to mark
out definitely the water-partings. But to do so in this manner now,
when the large contour maps of the Ordnance Survey may be in any one's
hands, is inexcusable. A study of those maps, or, better still, a visit
to the tops of a few of the dominant points in the area under review,
will effectually dispel the idea that the Southern Uplands consist of a
series of ridges zigzagging across the country. Like the Highlands, the
area of the Southern Uplands is simply an old table-land, furrowed into
ravine and valley by the operation of the various agents of erosion.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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