Records of Woodhall Spa and Neighbourhood: Historical, Anecdotal, Physiographical, and Archaeological, with Other MatterWalter, J. Conway (James Conway)
History
Records of Woodhall Spa and Neighbourhood: Historical, Anecdotal, Physiographical, and Archaeological, with Other Matter
Walter, J. Conway (James Conway)
Woodhall Spa (England)
a special “boulder committee” engaged in the investigation of this
subject.
The late Professor Sedgewick, of Cambridge (whose lectures the writer
attended), was the first to notice that along the Holderness shore there
were (as he says) “an incredible number of blocks of granite, gneiss,
greenstone, mica, etc., etc., resembling specimens derived from various
parts of Scandinavia.” {90} These, we now know, were dropped by the
great Scandinavian glacier; and, along with the kinds of stone here
named, there are also boulders of Rhombporphyry (the “Rhomben porphyry”
of Norwegian geologists, from the neighbourhood of Christiana), Augite
syenite, and several more, not of British origin. These boulders are now
being searched for, and found in our own neighbourhood. On the other
hand, there is the different class of boulders which were brought down by
the native inland glaciers. These consist largely of igneous kinds. The
rugged hills of the Lake district owe their origin to fire; and the
boulders which the glaciers have transported correspond. The shap
granite, for instance, which is probably one of the commonest of this
class, comes from the shap granite bed of Wastdale, in Cumberland.
Boulders of this rock, as Mr. Kendall tells us, “passed over Stainmoor in
tens of thousands,” {91a} to visit us in Yorkshire and Lincolnshire.
Other kinds are Felspar porphyry from Eskdale, in Cumberland, Andesite
from Borrowdale, Granophyr from Ennerdale and Buttermere, Quartz, Basalt,
and several more from the crystalline formations in the Lake district.
Several boulders of these rocks have also been found in our own
neighbourhood; and doubtless more remain to reward the explorer. {91b} I
have dwelt at some length on this particular formation—the boulder
clay—because it is the most ready to hand; it lies on the surface, in
many parts around us, within the ken of the ordinary visitor to Woodhall
Spa. It may give an additional interest to his rambles in search of
health, to know that he may, at any moment, pick up a boulder which has
travelled further, and passed through more strange vicissitudes, than he
can well have done himself; perhaps, with Shakespeare, to read “Sermons
in Stones,” and to moralise on the brevity of human life, with all its
ailments, compared with those ages untold, through which the pebble in
his hand slowly {91c} travelled on its long, laborious journey, to rest
at length as a constituent element of the locality, where he himself is
seeking relief and recreation.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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