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To modern eyes, the Lake District shows numerous manifestations of glacial activity, and many interesting studies of glaciation have been undertaken there over the last 150 years or so. However, it was not the area of Britain where the most important early ideas about glaciation and glacial phenomena were developed. The Scots were the leaders in such investigations, and Andrew Ramsay's work in Wales came before the development of detailed glacial work in the Lakes. Nevertheless, it was inevitable that geologists should turn their attention to glaciation in the Lakes, and in this chapter I examine some of the work done on the Pleistocene geology of the region, considering how it related to the development of theories in other regions and to the general development of Pleistocene stratigraphy.
When Sedgwick did his early work in the Lakes in 1822-1824, he saw plenty of evidence for what, following William Buckland, he called 'alluvium' and 'diluvium'. The latter referred, in the words of Buckland (1819, p. 532), to 'the superficial gravel beds produced by the last universal deluge', and was regarded as a product of marine deposition, even though the material was generally unsorted and often contained angular clasts. Such material was to be found all over the place in the Lakes,
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