This is a large subject. For in the different towns of these
islands, the walls are built of stones of almost every age, from the
earliest to the latest; and the town-geologist may find a quite
different problem to solve in the nearest wall, on moving from one
town to another twenty miles off. All I can do, therefore, is to
take one set of towns, in the walls of which one sort of stones is
commonly found, and talk of them; taking care, of course, to choose a
stone which is widely distributed. And such, I think, we can find in
the so-called New Red sandstone, which, with its attendant marls,
covers a vast tract--and that a rich and busy one--of England. From
Hartlepool and the mouth of the Tees, down through Yorkshire and
Nottinghamshire; over the manufacturing districts of central England;
down the valley of the Severn; past Bristol and the Somersetshire
flats to Torquay in South Devon; up north-westward through Shropshire
and Cheshire; past Liverpool and northward through Lancashire;
reappearing again, north of the Lake mountains, about Carlisle and
the Scotch side of the Solway Frith, stretches the New Red sandstone
plain, from under which everywhere the coal-bearing rocks rise as
from a sea. It contains, in many places, excellent quarries of
building-stone; the most famous of which, perhaps, are the well-known
Runcorn quarries, near Liverpool, from which the old Romans brought
the material for the walls and temples of ancient Chester, and from
which the stone for the restoration of Chester Cathedral is being
taken at this day. In some quarters, especially in the north-west of
England, its soil is poor, because it is masked by that very boulder-
clay of which I spoke in my last paper. But its rich red marls,
wherever they come to the surface, are one of God's most precious
gifts to this favoured land. On them, one finds oneself at once in a
garden; amid the noblest of timber, wheat, roots, grass which is
green through the driest summers, and, in the western counties,
cider-orchards laden with red and golden fruit. I know, throughout
northern Europe, no such charming scenery, for quiet beauty and solid
wealth, as that of the New Red marls; and if I wished to show a
foreigner what England was, I should take him along them, from
Yorkshire to South Devon, and say--There. Is not that a country
worth living for,--and worth dying for if need be?
Another reason which I have for dealing with the New Red sandstone is
this--that (as I said just now) over great tracts of England,
especially about the manufacturing districts, the town-geologist will
find it covered immediately by the boulder clay.
The townsman, finding this, would have a fair right to suppose that
the clay was laid down immediately, or at least soon after, the
sandstones or marls on which it lies; that as soon as the one had
settled at the bottom of some old sea, the other settled on the top
of it, in the same sea.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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