Ian Francis - Lake District: Landscape and Geology

The Lake District

LANDSCAPE AND GEOLOGY

Sphinx Rock, a crag high on Great Gable near the western edge of the Scafell volcanic caldera, looking southwest over the deep glaciated trough of Wasdale.

The Lake District

LANDSCAPE AND GEOLOGY

Ian Francis, Stuart Holmes and Bruce Yardley

First published in 2022 by
The Crowood Press Ltd
Ramsbury, Marlborough
Wiltshire SN8 2HR

www.crowood.com

This e-book first published in 2022

Ian Francis, Stuart Holmes and Bruce Yardley 2022

All rights reserved. This e-book is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the authors and publishers rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN 978 0 71984 012 8

Acknowledgements
The authors would like to thank the many people who have helped in various ways, in particular Peter Knight (University of Keele), Hugh Tuffen (University of Lancaster), and David Breeze OBE, all of whom read and commented on sections of the book. Joe Murphy (Cumbria Wildlife Trust), Lois Mansfield (University of Cumbria), John Lackie (Cumbria GeoConservation) and David Harper (University of Durham) gave valuable advice. Richard Fox (Fix the Fells) provided text and images for parts of Chapter 10, and the artist Julian Heaton-Cooper provided text and kindly allowed reproduction of four of his paintings in Chapter 6. Thanks are also due to Kelly Davis, whose editing skills improved the manuscript enormously. Bruce Yardley would also like to thank Joe Cann, Alan Smith and the late Murray Mitchell for their introductions to various aspects of Lake District geology.

Front cover: Lingmoor Fell and Side Pike, looking towards the Langdale Pikes.

Cover design by Maggie Mellett

CHAPTER 1

Birth of the Lake District

A remarkable interaction between geology, climate and human activity has produced some of the worlds most glorious scenery in the fells and valleys of this corner of northwest England. The 2362 square kilometres of the National Park boast Englands highest mountain, its largest lake and many of its most dramatic landscapes.

The Lake District. The white line of the National Park boundary encloses the high fells and lakes of Cumbria.

Today, Lakeland attracts millions of visitors every year, but until the mid-eighteenth century no sensible person would have chosen to go there for pleasure or recreation. Most considered it a remote and intimidating wasteland, a view expressed by Daniel Defoe in 1724:

Westmorland, eminent only for being the wildest, most barren and frightful of any that I have passed over in England bounded by a chain of almost impassable mountains, which in the language of the country are called Fells.

In the second half of the eighteenth century, perspectives shifted as ideas of the picturesque took hold in the popular imagination. The Lakes began to attract writers and artists, who were thrilled and inspired by the wildness of the mountain scenery and captivated by the dramatic juxtaposition of frightful crags with the pastoral tranquillity of the valleys and lakes.

Early geologists

While the Lake District played a unique part in the development of the Romantic imagination, it also attracted a new sort of adventurer geologists who classified the regions rocks and minerals, and who sought to understand the processes that had created its remarkable landscape. The region produced its own pioneers in the field, notably Jonathan Otley (born in Grasmere in 1766 and later a resident of Keswick) and the illustrious Adam Sedgwick (born in Dent), who became Woodwardian Professor of Geology at the University of Cambridge. Sedgwick and Otley first met in 1823, and they remained friends and geological collaborators until Otleys death in 1856.

In 1820, Otley published a short letter relating to his findings in a rather obscure Cumbrian journal known as The Lonsdale Magazine. Entitled On the Succession of the Rocks in the District of the Lakes, it was reproduced later that year in the more widely read Philosophic Magazine. In it, Otley described for the first time the three distinct belts of rock that underlie the Lake District, and their relative ages.

He observed that the first, and lowest, in the series forms the mountains Skiddaw, Saddleback, Grisedale Pike and Grasmoor, with most of the Newlands mountains All the rocks of this division are of a dark colour, inclining to black, and generally of a slaty structure. Otley called these rocks Clayslates. Next, he identified what he called the Greenstones:

Rocks more varied in their composition generally of a pale bluish-grey colour. The mountains of Eskdale, Wasdale, Borrowdale, Langdale, Grasmere, Patterdale, Martindale, Mardale, etc including the highest mountains are all in this division.

Last, he described the third division, which [formed] only inferior elevations. This belt [commenced] with a bed of a dark blue limestone succeeded by rocks of excellent flags and dark-coloured roofing slate. These rocks form the low country around Windermere and Coniston Water.

), he is rightly called the father of Lakeland geology.

By the middle of the nineteenth century, all discerning visitors to the region were expected to have at least some interest in its geology. Wordsworth included three long passages written by Adam Sedgwick in the 1842 edition of his famous Guide to the Lakes. These beautifully summarized what was then known about the regions geology, and they are still worth reading today. Sedgwick observed that the high Cumbrian fells appear as a jumble of peaks and valleys markedly set apart from the more subdued hills that surround them:

By whatever line a good observer enters the region he must be struck with the great contrast between the hills and mountains that are arranged on its outskirts, and those which rise up towards its centre. On the outskirts, the mountains have a dull outline, and a continual tendency to a tabular form: but those in the interior have a much more varied figure, and sometimes present outlines which are peaked, jagged, or serrated.

The rocks around the edges of the high fell country sometimes lie on top of Lakeland rocks, which are often hard and slaty, with some tilted or contorted layers. Sedgwick surmised that the Lake District rocks must be much older than those of the surrounding regions. By the time the younger rocks of the periphery were laid down, the older rocks were already, as he put it, as hard and solid as they are at the present day.