We can only conjecture what the condition of this part of southern
Scotland was in the long ages that elapsed between the termination of
the Lower Carboniferous period and the close of the Tertiary ages. It
is more than likely that it shared in some of the submergences that
ensued during the deposition of the upper group of the Carboniferous
system; but after that it may have remained, for aught we can tell, in
the condition of dry land all through those prolonged periods which
are unrecorded in the rocks of the Cheviot Hills, but have left behind
them such noteworthy remains in England and other countries. Of one
thing we may be sure, that during a large part of those unrecorded ages
the Cheviot district could not have been an area of deposition. Rather
must it have existed for untold eras as dry land; and this explains
and accounts for the enormous denudation which the whole country has
experienced; for there can be little doubt that the Lower Carboniferous
strata of Carter Fell were at one time continuous with the similar
strata of the lower reaches of the Tweed valley. Yet hardly a trace of
the missing beds remains in any part of the country between the ridge
of the hills at the head of the Jed Water and the Tweed at Kelso. Only
little patches are found capping the high ground opposite Jedburgh, as
at Hunthill, etc. Thus more than a thousand feet of Lower Carboniferous
strata, and probably not less than five hundred or six hundred feet of
Old Red Sandstone rocks, have been slowly carried away, grain by grain,
from the face of the Cheviot district since the close of the Lower
Carboniferous period.
IV.
In the first of these papers some reference was made to the
configuration of the ground in the Cheviot district. We have seen
that the outlines assumed by the country have been determined in
large measure by the nature of the rocks. Thus where igneous masses
abound, the hills present a more or less irregular, and broken or lumpy
contour, while the valleys are frequently narrow and deep. In the
tracts occupied by Silurian strata, we have, as a rule, broad-topped
hill-masses with a smoothly-rounded outline, whose slopes generally
fall away with a long gentle sweep into soft green valleys, along the
bottoms of which the streams often flow in deep gullies and ravines.
Where the country is formed of sandstones, and other associated strata,
the hills are generally broad and well-rounded, but the outline is
not infrequently interrupted by lines of cliff and escarpment. These
strata, however, are confined chiefly to the low-grounds, where they
form a gently-undulating country, broken here and there, as in Dunian
Hill, Bonchester Hill, Rubers Law, etc., by abrupt cones and knobs of
igneous rock.
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