Character of the Rocks near Gardenstone--A Defunct Father-lasher--A
Geological Inference--Village of Gardenstone--The drunken
Scot--Gardenstone Inn--Lord Gardenstone--A Tempest threatened--The
Author's Ghost Story--The Lady in Green--Her Appearance and
Tricks--The Rescued Children--The murdered Peddler and his
Pack--Where the Green Dress came from--Village of Macduff--Peculiar
Appearance of the Beach at the Mouth of the Deveron--Dr. Emslie's
Fossils--_Pterichthys quadratus_--Argillaceous Deposit of
Blackpots--Pipe-laying in Scotland--Fossils of Blackpots Clay--Mr.
Longmuir's Description of them--Blackpots Deposit a Re-formation of
a Liasic Patch--Period of its Formation.
I lingered on the hill-side considerably longer than I ought; and then,
hurrying downwards to the beach, passed eastwards under a range of
abrupt, mouldering precipices of red sandstone, to the village. From the
lie of the strata, which, instead of inclining coastwise, dip towards
the interior of the country, and present in the descent seawards the
outcrop of lower and yet lower deposits of the formation, I found it
would be in vain to look for the ichthyolite beds along the shore. They
may possibly be found, however, though I lacked time to ascertain the
fact, along the sides of a deep ravine, which occurs near an old
ecclesiastical edifice of gray stone, perched, nest-like, half-way up
the bank, on a green hummock that overlooks the sea. The rocks, laid
bare by the tide, belong to the bed of coarse-grained red sandstone,
varying from eighty to a hundred and fifty feet in thickness, which lies
between the lower fish-bed and the great conglomerate, and which, in not
a few of its strata, passes itself into a species of conglomerate,
different only from that which it overlies, in being more finely
comminuted. The continuity of this bed, like that of the deposit on
which it rests, is very remarkable. I have found it occurring at many
various points, over an area at least ten thousand square miles in
extent, and bearing always the same well-marked character of a more
thoroughly ground-down conglomerate than the great conglomerate on which
it reposes. The underlying bed is composed of broken fragments of the
rocks below, crushed, as if by some imperfect rudimentary process, like
that which in a mill merely breaks the grain; whereas, in the bed above,
a portion of the previously-crushed materials seems to have been
subjected to some further attritive process, like that through which, in
the mill, the broken grain is ground down into meal or flour.
As I passed onwards, I saw, amid a heap of drift-weed stranded high on
the beach by the previous tide, a defunct father-lasher, with the two
defensive spines which project from its opercles stuck fast into little
cubes of cork, that had floated its head above water, as the
tyro-swimmer floats himself upon bladders; and my previous acquaintance
with the habits of a fishing village enabled me at once to determine why
and how it had perished. Though almost never used as food on the eastern
coast of Scotland, it had been inconsiderate enough to take the
fisherman's bait, as if it had been worthy of being eaten; and he had
avenged himself for the trouble it had cost him, by mounting it on cork,
and sending it off, to wander between wind and water, like the Flying
Dutchman, until it died. Was there ever on earth a creature save man
that could have played a fellow-mortal a trick at once so ingeniously
and gratuitously cruel? Or what would be the proper inference, were I to
find one of the many-thorned ichthyolites of the Lower Old Red Sandstone
with the spines of its pectorals similarly fixed on cubes of
lignite?--that there had existed in these early ages not merely
_physical death_, but also _moral evil_; and that the being who
perpetrated the evil could not only inflict it simply for the sake of
the pleasure he found in it, and without prospect of advantage to
himself, but also by so adroitly reversing, fiend-like, the purposes of
the benevolent Designer, that the weapons given for the defence of a
poor harmless creature should be converted into the instruments of its
destruction. It was not without meaning that it was forbidden by the law
of Moses to seethe a kid in its mother's milk.
A steep bulwark in front, against which the tide lashes twice every
twenty-four hours,--an abrupt hill behind,--a few rows of squalid
cottages built of red sandstone, much wasted by the keen sea-winds,--a
wilderness of dunghills and ruinous pig-styes,--women seated at the
doors, employed in baiting lines or mending nets,--groups of men
lounging lazily at some gable-end fronting the sea,--herds of ragged
children playing in the lanes,--such are the components of the fishing
village of Gardenstone. From the identity of name, I had associated the
place with that Lord Gardenstone of the Court of Sessions who published,
late in the last century, a volume of "Miscellanies in Prose and Verse,"
containing, among other clever things, a series of tart criticisms on
English plays, transcribed, it was stated in the preface, from the
margins and fly-leaves of the books of a "small library kept open by his
Lordship" for the amusement of travellers at the inn of some village in
his immediate neighborhood; and taking it for granted, somehow, that
Gardenstone was the village, I was looking around me for the inn, in the
hope that where his Lordship had opened a library I might find a dinner.
But failing to discern it, I addressed myself on the subject to an
elderly man in a pack-sheet apron, who stood all alone, looking out upon
the sea, like Napoleon, in the print, from a projection of the bulwark.
He turned round, and showed, by an unmistakable expression of eye and
feature, that he was what the servant girl in "Guy Mannering"
characterizes as "very particularly drunk,"--not stupidly, but happily,
funnily, conceitedly drunk, and full of all manner of high thoughts of
himself. "It'll be an awfu' coorse nicht," he said, "fra the sea." "Very
likely," I replied, reiterating my query in a form that indicated some
little confidence of receiving the needed information; "I daresay you
could point me out the public-house here?" "Aweel, I wat, that I can;
but what's that?" pointing to the straps of my knapsack;--"are ye a
sodger on the Queen's account, or ye'r ain?" "On my own, to be sure; but
have ye a public-house here?" "Ay, twa; ye'll be a traveller?" "O yes,
great traveller, and very hungry: have I passed the best public-house?"
"Ay; and ye'll hae come a gude stap the day?" A woman came up, with
spectacles on nose, and a piece of white seam-work in her hand; and,
cutting short the dialogue by addressing myself to her, she at once
directed me to the public-house. "Hoot, gude-wife," I heard the man say,
as I turned down the street, "we suld ha'e gotten mair oot o' him. He's
a great traveller yon, an' has a gude Scots tongue in his head."
Travellers, save when, during the herring season, an occasional
fish-curer comes the way, rarely bait at the Gardenstone inn; and in the
little low-browed room, with its windows in the thatch, into which, as
her best, the land-lady ushered me, I certainly found nothing to
identify the _locale_ with that chosen by the literary lawyer for his
open library. But, according to Ferguson, though "learning was scant,
provision was good;" and I dined sumptuously on an immense platter of
fried flounders. There was a little bit of cold pork added to the fare;
but, aware from previous experience of the pisciverous habits of the
swine of a fishing village, I did what I knew the defunct pig must have
very frequently done before me,--satisfied a keenly-whetted appetite on
fish exclusively. I need hardly remind the reader that Lord
Gardenstone's inn was not that of Gardenstone, but that of
Laurence-kirk,--the thriving village which it was the special ambition
of this law-lord of the last century to create; and which, did it
produce only its famed snuff-boxes, with the invisible hinges, would be
rather a more valuable boon to the country than that secured to it by
those law-lords of our own days, who at one fell blow disestablished the
national religion of Scotland, and broke off the only handle by which
their friends the politicians could hope to _manage_ the country's old
vigorous Presbyterianism. Meanwhile it was becoming apparent that the
man with the apron had as shrewdly anticipated the character of the
coming night as if he had been soberer. The sun, ere its setting,
disappeared in a thick leaden haze, which enveloped the whole heavens;
and twilight seemed posting on to night a full hour before its time. I
settled a very moderate bill, and set off under the cliffs at a round
pace, in the hope of scaling the hill, and gaining the high road atop
which leads to Macduff, ere the darkness closed. I had, however,
miscalculated my distance; I, besides, lost some little time in the
opening of the deep ravine to which I have already referred as that in
which possibly the fish-beds may be found cropping out; and I had got
but a little beyond the gray ecclesiastical ruin, with its lonely
burying-ground, when the tempest broke and the night fell.
One of the last objects which I saw, as I turned to take a farewell look
of the bay of Gamrie, was the magnificent promontory of Troup Head,
outlined in black on a ground of deep gray, with its two terminal stacks
standing apart in the sea. And straightway, through one of those tricks
of association so powerful in raising, as if from the dead, buried
memories of things of which the mind has been oblivious for years, there
started up in recollection the details of an ancient ghost-story, of
which I had not thought before for perhaps a quarter of a century. It
had been touched, I suppose, in its obscure, unnoted corner, as Ithuriel
touched the toad, by the apparition of the insulated stacks of Troup,
seen dimly in the thickening twilight over the solitary burying-ground.
For it so chances that one of the main incidents of the story bears
reference to an insulated sea-stack; and it is connected altogether,
though I cannot fix its special locality, with this part of the coast.
The story had been long in my mother's family, into which it had been
originally brought by a great-grandfather of the writer, who quitted
some of the seaport villages of Banffshire for the northern side of the
Moray Frith, about the year 1718; and, when pushing on in the darkness,
straining as I best could, to maintain a sorely-tried umbrella against
the capricious struggles of the tempest, that now tatooed furiously upon
its back as if it were a kettle-drum, and now got underneath its stout
ribs, and threatened to send it up aloft like a balloon, and anon
twisted it from side to side, and strove to turn it inside out, like a
Kilmarnock night-cap,--I employed myself in arranging in my mind the
details of the narrative, as they had been communicated to me half an
age before by a female relative.
The opening of the story, though it existed long ere the times of Sir
Walter Scott or the Waverly novels, bears some resemblance to the
opening in the "Monastery," of the story of the White Lady of Avenel.
The wife of a Banffshire proprietor of the minor class had been about
six months dead, when one of her husband's ploughmen, returning on
horseback from the smithy, in the twilight of an autumn evening, was
accosted, on the banks of a small stream, by a stranger lady, tall and
slim, and wholly attired in green, with her face wrapped up in the hood
of her mantle, who requested to be taken up behind him on the horse, and
carried across. There was something in the tones of her voice that
seemed to thrill through his very bones, and to insinuate itself, in the
form of a chill fluid, between his skull and the scalp. The request,
too, appeared a strange one; for the rivulet was small and low, and
could present no serious bar to the progress of the most timid
traveller. But the man, unwilling ungallantly to offend a lady, turned
his horse to the bank, and she sprang up lightly behind him. She was,
however, a personage that could be better seen than felt; she came in
contact with the ploughman's back, he said, as if she had been an
ill-filled sack of wool; and when, on reaching the opposite side of the
streamlet, she leaped down as slightly as she had mounted, and he turned
fearfully round to catch a second glimpse of her, it was in the
conviction that she was a creature considerably less earthly in her
texture than himself. She had opened, with two pale, thin arms, the
enveloping hood, exhibiting a face equally pale and thin, which seemed
marked, however, by the roguish, half-humorous expression of one who had
just succeeded in playing off a good joke. "My dead mistress!!"
exclaimed the ploughman. "Yes, John, _your mistress_," replied the
ghost. "But ride home, my bonny man, for it's growing late: you and I
will be better acquainted ere long." John accordingly rode home and told
his story.
Next evening, about the same hour, as two of the laird's servant-maids
were engaged in washing in an out-house, there came a slight tap to the
door. "Come in," said one of the maids; and the lady entered, dressed,
as on the previous night, in green. She swept past them to the inner
part of the washing-room; and, seating herself on a low bench, from
which, ere her death, she used occasionally to superintend their
employment, she began to question them, as if still in the body, about
the progress of their work. The girls, however, were greatly too
frightened to make any reply. She then visited an old woman who had
nursed the laird, and to whom she used to show, ere her departure,
greatly more kindness than her husband. And she now seemed as much
interested in her welfare as ever. She inquired whether the laird was
kind to her, and looking round her little smoky cottage, regretted she
should be so indifferently lodged, and that her cupboard, which was
rather of the emptiest at the time, should not be more amply furnished.
For nearly a twelvemonth after, scarce a day passed in which she was not
seen by some of the domestics; never, however, except on one occasion,
after the sun had risen, or before it had set. The maids could see her,
in the gray of the morning flitting like a shadow round their beds, or
peering in upon them at night through the dark window-panes, or at
half-open doors. In the evening she would glide into the kitchen or some
of the out-houses,--one of the most familiar and least dignified of her
class that ever held intercourse with mankind,--and inquire of the girls
how they had been employed during the day; often, however, without
obtaining an answer, though from a cause different from that which had
at first tied their tongues. For they had become so regardless of her
presence, viewing her simply as a troublesome mistress, who had no
longer any claim to be heeded, that when she entered, and they had
dropped their conversation, under the impression that their visitor was
a creature of flesh and blood like themselves, they would again resume
it, remarking that the entrant was "only the green lady." Though always
cadaverously pale, and miserable looking, she affected a joyous
disposition, and was frequently heard to laugh, even when invisible. At
one time, when provoked by the studied silence of a servant girl, she
flung a pillow at her head, which the girl caught up and returned; at
another, she presented her first acquaintance, the ploughman, with what
seemed to be a handful of silver coin, which he transferred to his
pocket, but which, on hearing her laugh, he drew out, and found to be
merely a handful of slate shivers. On yet another occasion, the man,
when passing on horseback through a clump of wood, was repeatedly struck
from behind the trees by little pellets of turf; and, on riding into the
thicket, he found that his assailant was the green lady. To her husband
she never appeared; but he frequently heard the tones of her voice
echoing from the lower apartments, and the faint peal of her cold,
unnatural laugh.
One day at noon, a year after her first appearance, the old nurse was
surprised to see her enter the cottage; as all her previous visits had
been made early in the morning or late in the evening; whereas
now,--though the day was dark and lowering, and a storm of wind and rain
had just broken out,--still it _was_ day. "Mammie," she said, "I cannot
open the heart of the laird, and I have nothing of my own to give you;
but I think I can do something for you now. Go straight to the White
House [that of a neighboring proprietor], and tell the folk there to set
out with all the speed of man and horse for the black rock in the sea,
at the foot of the crags, or they'll rue it dearly to their dying day.
Their bairns, foolish things, have gone out to the rock, and the tide
has flowed around them; and, if no help reach them soon, they'll be all
scattered like sea-ware on the shore ere the fall of the sea. But if you
go and tell your story at the White House, mammie, the bairns will be
safe for an hour to come, and there will be something done by their
mother to better you, for the news." The woman went, as directed, and
told her story; and the father of the children set out on horseback in
hot haste for the rock,--a low, insulated skerry, which, lying on a
solitary part of the beach, far below the line of flood, was shut out
from the view of the inhabited country by a wall of precipices, and
covered every tide by several feet of water. On reaching the edge of the
cliffs, he saw the black rock, as the woman had described, surrounded by
the sea, and the children clinging to its higher crags. But, though the
waves were fast rising, his attempts to ride out through the surf to the
poor little things were frustrated by their cries, which so frightened
his horse as to render it unmanageable; and so he had to gallop on to
the nearest fishing village for a boat. So much time was unavoidably
lost in consequence, that nearly the whole beach was covered by the sea,
and the surf had begun to lash the feet of the precipices behind; but
until the boat arrived, not a single wave dashed over the black rock;
though immediately after the last of the children had been rescued, an
immense wreath of foam rose twice a man's height over its topmost
pinnacle.
The old nurse, on her return to the cottage, found the green lady
sitting beside the fire. "Mammie," she said, "you have made friends to
yourself to-day, who will be kinder to you than your foster-son. I must
now leave you. My time is out, and you'll be all left to yourselves; but
I'll have no rest, mammie, for many a twelvemonth to come. Ten years
ago, a travelling peddler broke into our garden in the fruit season, and
I sent out our old ploughman, who is now in Ireland, to drive him away.
It was on a Sunday, and everybody else was in church. The men struggled
and fought, and the peddler was killed. But though I at first thought of
bringing the case before the laird, when I saw the dead man's pack, with
its silks and its velvets, and this unhappy piece of green satin
(shaking her dress), my foolish heart beguiled me, and I made the
ploughman bury the peddler's body under our ash tree, in the corner of
our garden, and we divided his goods and money between us. You must bid
the laird raise his bones, and carry them to the churchyard; and the
gold, which you will find in the little bowl under the tapestry in my
room, must be sent to a poor old widow, the peddler's mother, who lives
on the shore of Leith. I must now away to Ireland to the ploughman; and
I'll be e'en less welcome to him, mammie, than at the laird's; but the
hungry blood cries loud against us both,--him and me,--and we must
suffer together. Take care you look not after me till I have passed the
knowe." She glided away, as she spoke, in a gleam of light; and when the
old woman had withdrawn her hand from her eyes, dazzled by the sudden
brightness, she saw only a large black gray-hound crossing the moor. And
the green lady was never afterwards seen in Scotland. The little hoard
of gold pieces, however, stored in a concealed recess of her former
apartment, and the mouldering ruins of the peddler under the ash tree,
gave evidence to the truth of her narrative. The story was hardly wild
enough for a night so drear and a road so lonely; its ghost-heroine was
but a homely ghost-heroine, too little aware that the same familiarity
which, according to the proverb, breeds contempt when exercised by the
denizens of this world, produces similar effects when too much indulged
in by the inhabitants of another. But the arrangement and restoration of
the details of the tradition,--for they had been scattered in my mind
like the fragments of a broken fossil,--furnished me with so much
amusement, when struggling with the storm, as to shorten by at least
one-half the seven miles which intervene between Gamrie and Macduff.
Instead, however, of pressing on to Banff, as I had at first intended,
I baited for the night at a snug little inn in the latter village, which
I reached just wet enough to enjoy the luxury of a strong clear fire of
Newcastle coal.
Mrs. Longmuir had furnished me with a note of introduction to Dr. Emslie
of Banff, an intelligent geologist, familiar with the deposits of the
district; and, walking on to his place of residence next morning, in a
rain as heavy as that of the previous night, I made it my first business
to wait on him, and deliver the note. Ere, however, crossing the
Deveron, which flows between Banff and Macduff, I paused for a few
minutes in the rain, to mark the peculiar appearance presented by the
beach where the river disembogues into the frith. Occurring as a
rectangular spit in the line of the shore, with the expanded stream
widening into an estuary on its upper side, and the open sea on the
lower, it marks the scene of an obstinate contest between antagonist
forces,--the powerful sweep of the torrent, and the not less powerful
waves of the stormy north-east; and exists, in consequence, as a long
gravelly prism, which presents as steep an angle of descent to the waves
on the one side as to the current on the other. It is a true river bar,
beaten in from its proper place in the sea by the violence of the surf,
and fairly stranded. Dr. Emslie obligingly submitted to my inspection
his set of Gamrie fossils, containing several good specimens of
Pterichthys and Coccosteus, undistinguishable, like those I had seen on
the previous day, in their state of keeping, and the character of the
nodular matrices in which they lie, from my old acquaintance the
Cephalaspians of Cromarty. The animal matter which the bony plates and
scales originally contained has been converted, in both the Gamrie and
Cromarty ichthyolites, into a jet-black bitumen; and in both, the
inclosing nodules consist of a smoke-colored argillaceous limestone,
which formed around the organisms in a bed of stratified clay, and at
once exhibits, in consequence, the rectilinear lines of the
stratification, mechanical in their origin, and the radiating ones of
the sub-crystalline concretion, purely a trick of the chemistry of the
deposit. A Pterichthys in Dr. Emslie's collection struck me as different
in its proportions from any I had previously seen, though, from its
state of rather imperfect preservation, I hesitated to pronounce
absolutely upon the fact. I cannot now doubt, however, that it belonged
to a species not figured nor described at the time; but which, under the
name of _Pterichthys quadratus_, forms in part the subject of a still
unpublished memoir, in which Sir Philip Egerton, our first British
authority on fossil fish, has done me the honor to associate my humble
name with his own; and which will have the effect of reducing to the
ranks of the Pterichthyan genus the supposed genera _Pamphractus_ and
_Homothorax_. A second set of fossils, which Dr. Emslie had derived from
his tile-works at Blackpots, proved, I found, identical with those of
the Eathie Lias. As this Banffshire deposit had formed a subject of
considerable discussion and difference among geologists, I was curious
to examine it; and the Doctor, though the day was still none of the
best, kindly walked out with me, to bring under my notice appearances
which, in the haste of a first examination, I might possibly overlook,
and to show me yet another set of fossils which he kept at the works. He
informed me, as we went, that the Grauwacke (Lower Silurian) deposits of
the district, hitherto deemed so barren, had recently yielded their
organisms in a slate quarry at Gamrie-head; and that they belong to that
ancient family of the Pennatularia which, in this northern kingdom,
seems to have taken precedence of all the others. Judging from what now
appears, the Graptolite must be regarded as the first settler who
squatted for a living in that deep-sea area of undefined boundary
occupied at the present time by the bold wave-worn headlands and blue
hills of Scotland; and this new Banffshire locality not only greatly
extends the range of the fossil in reference to the kingdom, but also
establishes, in a general way, the fossiliferous identity of the Lower
Silurian deposits to the north of the Grampians with that of
Peebles-shire and Galloway in the south,--so far as I know, the only
other two Scottish districts in which this organism has been found.
The argillaceous deposit of Blackpots occupies, in the form of a green
swelling bank, a promontory rather soft than bold in its contour, that
projects far into the sea, and forms, when tipped with its slim column
of smoke from the tile-kiln, a pleasing feature in the landscape. I had
set it down on the previous day, when it first caught my eye from the
lofty cliffs of Gamrie-head, at the distance of some ten or twelve
miles, as different in character from all the other features of the
prospect. The country generally is moulded on a framework of primary
rock, and presents headlands of hard, sharp outline, to the attrition of
the waves; whereas this single headland in the midst,--soft-lined,
undulatory, and plump,--seems suited to remind one of Burns's young Kirk
Alloway beauty disporting amid the thin old ladies that joined with her
in the dance. And it _is_ a greatly younger beauty than the Cambrian and
mica-schist protuberances that encroach on the sea on either side of it.
The sheds and kilns of a tile-work occupy the flat terminal point of the
promontory; and as the clay is valuable, in this tile-draining age, for
the facility with which it can be moulded into pipe-tiles (a purpose
which the ordinary clays of the north of Scotland, composed chiefly of
re-formations of the Old Red Sandstone, are what is technically termed
too _short_ to serve), it is gradually retreating inland before the
persevering spade and mattock of the laborer. The deposit has already
been drawn out into many hundred miles of cylindrical pipes, and is
destined to be drawn out into many thousands more,--such being one of
the strange metamorphoses effected in the geologic formations, now that
that curious animal the Bimana has come upon the stage; and at length it
will have no existence in the country, save as an immense system of
veins and arteries underlying the vegetable mould. Will these veins and
arteries, I marvel, form, in their turn, the _fossils_ of another
period, when a higher platform than that into which they have been laid
will be occupied to the full by plants and animals specifically
different from those of the present scene of things,--the existences of
a happier and more finished creation? My business to-day, however, was
with the fossils which the deposit now contains,--not with those which
it may ultimately form.
The Blackpots clay is of a dark-bluish or greenish-gray color, and so
adhesive, that I now felt, when walking among it, after the softening
rains of the previous night and morning, as if I had got into a bed of
bird-lime. It is thinly charged with rolled pebbles, septaria, and
pieces of a bituminous shale, containing broken Belemnites, and
sorely-flattened Ammonites, that exist as thin films of a white chalky
lime. The pebbles, like those of the boulder-clay of the northern side
of the Moray Frith, are chiefly of the primary rocks and older
sandstones, and were probably in the neighborhood, in their present
rolled form, long ere the re-formation of the inclosing mass; while the
shale and the septaria are, as shown by their fossils, decidedly Liasic.
I detected among the conchifers a well-marked species of our northern
Lias, figured by Sowerby from Eathie specimens,--the _Plagiostoma
concentrica_; and among the Cephalopoda, though considerably broken,
the _Belemnite elongatus_ and _Belemnite lanceolata_, with the _Ammonite
Koenigi_ (_mutabilis_),--all Eathie shells. I, besides, found in the
bank a piece of a peculiar-looking quartzose sandstone, traversed by
hard jaspedeous veins of a brownish-gray color, which I have never
found, in Scotland at least, save associated with the Lias of our
north-eastern coasts. Further, my attention was directed by Dr. Emslie
to a fine Lignite in his collection, which had once formed some eighteen
inches or two feet of the trunk of a straight slender pine,--probably
the _Pinites Eiggensis_,--in which, as in most woods of the Lias and
Oolite, the annual rings are as strongly marked as in the existing firs
or larches of our hill-sides.[11] The Blackpots deposit is evidently a
re-formation of a Liasic patch, identical, both in mineralogical
character and in its organic remains, with the lower beds of the Eathie
Lias; while the fragments of shale which it contains belong chiefly to
an upper Liasic bed. So rich is the dark-colored tenacious argil of the
Inferior Lias of Eathie, that the geologist who walks over it when it is
still moist with the receding tide would do well to look to his
footing;--the mixture of soap and grease spread by the ship-carpenter
on his launch-slips, to facilitate the progress of his vessel seawards,
is not more treacherous to the tread: while the Upper Liasic deposit
which rests over it is composed of a dark slaty shale, largely charged
with bitumen. And of a Liasic deposit of this compound character,
consisting in larger part of an inferior argillaceous bed, and in lesser
part of a superior one of dark shale, the tile-clay of Blackpots has
been formed.
I had next to determine whether aught remained to indicate the period of
its re-formation. The tile-works at the point of the promontory rest on
a bed of shell-sand, composed exclusively, like the sand so abundant on
the western coast of Scotland, of fragments of existing shells. These,
however, are so fresh and firm, that, though the stratum which they form
seems to underlie the clay at its edges, I cannot regard them as older
than the most modern of our ancient sea-margins. They formed, in all
probability, in the days of the old coast line, a white shelly beach,
under such a precipitous front of the dark clay as argillaceous deposits
almost always present to the undermining wear of the waves. On the
recession of the sea, however, to its present line, the abrupt, steep
front, loosened by the frosts and washed by the rains, would of course
gradually moulder down over them into a slope; and there would thus be
communicated to the shelly stratum, at least at its edges, an underlying
character. The true period of the re-formation of the deposit was, I can
have no doubt, that of the boulder-clay. I observed that the septaria
and larger masses of shale which the bed contains, bear, on
roughly-polished surfaces, in the line of their larger axes, the
mysterious groovings and scratchings of this period,--marks which I have
never yet known to fail in their chronological evidence. It may be
mentioned, too, simply as a fact, though one of less value than the
other, that the deposit occurs in its larger development exactly where,
in the average, the boulder-clays also are most largely developed,--a
little over that line where the waves for so many ages charged against
the coast, ere the last upheaval of the land or the recession of the sea
sent them back to their present margin. There had probably existed to
the west or north-west of the deposit, perhaps in the middle of the open
bay formed by the promontory on which it rests,--for the small
proportion of other than Liasic materials which it contains serves to
show that it could be derived from no great distance,--an outlier of the
Lower Lias. The icebergs of the cold glacial period, propelled along the
submerged land by some arctic current, or caught up by the gulf-stream,
gradually grated it down, as a mason's laborer grates down the surface
of the sandstone slab which he is engaged in polishing; and the
comminuted debris, borne eastwards by the current, was cast down here.
It has been stated that no Liasic remains have been found in the
boulder-clays of Scotland. They are certainly rare in the boulder-clays
of the northern shores of the Moray Frith; for there the nearest Lias,
bearing in a western direction from the clay, is that of Applecross, on
the other side of the island; and the materials of the boulder-deposits
of the north have invariably been derived in the line, westerly in its
general bearing, of the grooves and scratches of the iceberg era. But on
the southern shore of the frith, where that westerly line passed athwart
the Liasic beds of our eastern coast, organisms of the Lias are
comparatively common in the boulder-clays; and here, at Blackpots, we
find an extensive deposit of the same period formed of Liasic materials
almost exclusively. Fragments of still more modern rocks occur in the
boulder-clays of Caithness. My friend Mr. Robert Dick, of Thurso, to
whose persevering labors and interesting discoveries in the Old Red
Sandstone of his locality I have had frequent occasion to refer, has
detected in a blue boulder-clay, scooped into precipitous banks by the
river Thorsa, fragments both of chalk-flints and a characteristic
conglomerate of the Oolite. He has, besides, found it mottled from top
to bottom, a full hundred feet over the sea-level, and about two miles
inland, with comminuted fragments of existing shells. But of this more
anon.