Another conspicuous intercalation of sedimentary materials in the Skye plateau occurs on the Talisker cliffs at the mouth of Loch Bracadale, where, on the face of the great precipice of Rudha nan Clach, some conspicuous bands of lilac and red are interspersed among the basalts. These bands were noticed by Macculloch, who described them as varieties of "iron-clay."[263] I have not had an opportunity of examining them except from the sea at a little distance. But they suggest a similarity to some of the variegated clays between the upper and lower basalt series of Antrim. [Footnote 263: _Western Islands_, vol. i. p. 376.] Though good coal is not well developed in the Tertiary volcanic plateaux of the British Isles, it has already been pointed out that coaly layers are abundant, and that as the vegetable matter may confidently be assumed always to indicate terrestrial vegetation, the presence of the carbonaceous bands may be regarded as good evidence of some lapse of time between the eruption of the basalts which they separate. I have also called attention to the fact that the vegetable material is more especially observable in the highest parts of a group of intercalated sediments between two sheets of basalt. This relation, so strikingly exhibited in the isle of Canna, as already observed, is also to be remarked in the Skye plateau. I may here cite an interesting example which occurs at the base of the lofty sea-cliff of An Ceannaich, to the south of Dunvegan Head, on the west coast of Skye (Fig. 285). At the base of the precipice, ledges of a highly cellular basalt (_a_) show a singularly scoriaceous and amygdaloidal structure, with abundant and beautiful zeolites, the hollows of the upper surface of the sheet being filled in with dark brown carbonaceous shale, forming a layer from one to fourteen inches thick, marked by coaly streaks and lenticles (_b_). A band of green and yellow sandstone (_c_) next supervenes, which, from its pale colour, attracts attention from a distance, and led me, while yachting along the coast, to land at the locality in the hope that it might prove to be a plant-bearing limestone. This sandy stratum is only some three or four inches thick at the north end of the section, but increases rapidly southward to a thickness of as many feet or more, when, owing to the cessation of the underlying shale, it comes to lie directly on the amygdaloid and to enclose slaggy portions of that rock. Immediately above the sandstone two or three feet of fissile shale, black with plant-remains (_d_), include brown layers that yield to the knife like some oil-shales. The next stratum is a seam of coal (_e_) about a foot thick, of remarkable purity. It is glossy, hard, and cubical, including layers that break like jet. It has been succeeded by a deposit of green sand (_f_), but while this material was in course of deposition another outpouring of lava (_g_) took place, whereby the terrestrial pool or hollow of the