occasionally coincide more or less closely with the outcrops of the
more readily eroded strata; but such features are mere minor details
in the general configuration of the country. The courses of brooks
and streams may have been frequently determined by the nature and
arrangement of the rocks, but the general slope of the Uplands and the
direction of the main lines of water-flow are at right angles to the
trend of the strata, and cannot therefore have been determined in that
way. The strata generally are inclined at high angles--they occur, in
short, as a series of great anticlinal arches and synclinal curves, but
the tops of the grand folds have been planed off, and the axes of the
synclinal troughs, so far from coinciding with valleys, very often run
along the tops of the highest hills. The foldings and plications do
not, in a word, produce any corresponding undulations of the surface.
Mention has been made of the elevated moory tracts that serve to
connect the Cheviots with the loftier Uplands lying to north-west.
The configuration of these moors is tamer even than that of the
regions just described, but the same general form prevails from
the neighbourhood of the Moffat Hills to the head-waters of the
Teviot. There, however, other varieties of rock appear, and produce
corresponding changes in the aspect of the high grounds. Not a few of
the hills in this district stand out prominently. They are more or less
pyramidal and conical in shape, being built up of sandstones often
crowned atop with a capping of some crystalline igneous rock, such as
basalt. The Maiden Paps, Leap Hill, Needs Law, and others are examples.
The heights draining towards Liddesdale and lower reaches of Eskdale,
composed chiefly of sandstones, with here and there intercalated
sheets of harder igneous rock, frequently show escarpments and
terraced outlines, but have a general undulating contour; and similar
features are characteristic of the sandstone mountains that form the
south-west portion of the Cheviots. Towards the north-east, however,
the sandstones give place to various igneous rocks, so that the hills
in the north-east section of the Cheviots differ very much in aspect
and configuration from those at the other extremity of the belt. They
have a more varied and broken outline, closely resembling many parts of
the Ochils and other portions of the Northern and Southern Heights of
the Central Lowlands.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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