It is one thing to tell the story of the idea about how therocks of the lake District were formed, but what happened tothem after they came into being? In this chapter, I shall saysomething about this important issue. One might think that themountains that we see in the Central Fells have been there eversince the Ordovician, and we are simply observing their erodedremnants. In a sense this is true. The volcanologists do thinkthat we are able to examine, in the field, the eroded interiorsof volcanoes. Are we able to do so because erosion has proceededto such an extent that their very 'guts' are now visible? Presumablythat is so, but why, then, are the 'guts' 'up in the air' forour inspection? Uplift can be expected because of the buoyancyof the underlying granites, but is that the whole story? And,presuming there was substantial uplift at some stage, when didthat uplift occur, and are there causes other than isostaticforces? These issues will be considered in the present chapter,which covers the geological history of the Lakes subsequentto the 'big crunch', which is thought to have occurred in theDevonian, through to the glacial epoch of the Pleistocene. Areview of matters relating to the presumed former sedimentarycover of Lakeland and the techniques for estimating its thicknesshas been given by Douglas Holliday in his Presidential Addressto the Yorkshire Geological Society at York on 5
...
This 250-word extract was created in the absence of an abstract.
