GLACIAL PERIOD IN SCOTLAND [Note 25].
Professor Agassiz, after his tour in Scotland in 1840, announced the opinion that erratic blocks had been dispersed from the Scottish mountains as from an independent centre, and that the capping of ice had been of extraordinary thickness.*
(* Agassiz, "Proceedings of the Geological Society" 1840 and
"Edinburgh Philosophical Journal" 49 page 79.)
Mr. Robert Chambers, after visiting Norway and Sweden, and comparing the signs of glacial action observed there with similar appearances in the Grampians, came to the conclusion that the Highlands both of Scandinavia and Scotland had once been "moulded in ice," and that the outward and downward movement and pressure of the frozen mass had not only smoothed, polished, and scratched the rocks, but had, in the course of ages, deepened and widened the valleys, and produced much of that denudation which has commonly been ascribed exclusively to aqueous action. The glaciation of the Scotch mountains was traced by him to the height of at least 3000 feet.*
(* "Ancient Sea Margins" Edinburgh 1848. Glacial Phenomena
"Edinburgh New Philosophical Journal" April 1853 and January
1855.)
Mr. T.F. Jamieson, of Ellon, in Aberdeenshire, has recently brought forward an additional body of facts in support of this theory. According to him the Grampians were at the period of extreme cold enveloped "in one great winding sheet of snow and ice," which reached everywhere to the coast-line, the land being then more elevated than it is now. He describes the glacial furrows sculptured on the solid rocks as pointing in Aberdeenshire to the south-east, those of the valley of the Forth at Edinburgh, from west to east, and higher up the same valley at Stirling, from north-west to south-east, as they should do if the ice had followed the lines of what is now the principal drainage. The observations of Sir James Hall, Mr. Maclaren, Mr. Chambers, and Dr. Fleming, are cited by him in confirmation of this arrangement of the glacial markings, while in Sutherland and Ross-shire he shows that the glacial furrows along the north coast point northwards, and in Argyleshire westwards, always in accordance with the direction of the principal glens and fjords.
Another argument is also adduced by him in proof of the ice having exerted its mechanical force in a direction from the higher and more inland country to the lower region and sea-coast. Isolated hills and minor prominences of rock are often polished and striated on the land side, while they remain rough and jagged on the side fronting the sea. This may be seen both on the east and west coast. Mention is also made of blocks of granite which have travelled from south to north in Aberdeenshire, of which there would have been no examples had the erratics been all brought by floating ice from the arctic regions when Scotland was submerged. It is also urged against the doctrine of attributing the general glaciation to submergence, that the glacial grooves, instead of radiating as they do from a centre, would, if they had been due to ice coming from the north, have been parallel to the coast-line, to which they are now often almost at right angles. The argument, moreover, which formerly had most weight in favour of floating ice, namely, that it explained why so many of the stones did not conform to the contour and direction of the minor hills and valleys, is now brought forward, and with no small effect, in favour of the doctrine of continental ice on the Greenlandic scale, which, after levelling up the lesser inequalities, would occasionally flow in mighty ice-currents, in directions often at a high angle to the smaller ridges and glens.
The application to Scandinavia and Scotland of this theory makes it necessary to reconsider the validity of the proofs formerly relied on as establishing the submergence of a great part of Scotland beneath the sea, at some period subsequent to the commencement of the glacial period. In all cases where marine shells overlie till, or rest on polished and striated surfaces of rock, the evidence of the land having been under water, and having been since upheaved, remains unshaken; but this special proof rarely extends to heights exceeding 500 feet. In the basin of the Clyde we have already seen that Recent strata occur 25 feet above the sea-level, with existing species of marine testacea, and with buried canoes, and other works of art. At the higher level of 50 feet occurs the well-known raised beach of the western coast, which, according to Mr. Jamieson, contains, near Fort William and on Loch Fyne and elsewhere, an assemblage of shells implying a colder climate than that of the 25-foot terrace, or that of the present sea; just as, in the valley of the Somme, the higher-level gravels are supposed to belong to a colder period than the lower ones, and still more decidedly than that of the present era. At still greater elevations, older beds containing a still more arctic group of shells have been observed at Airdrie, 14 miles south-east of Glasgow, 524 feet above the level of the sea. They were embedded in stratified clays, with the unstratified boulder till both above and below them, and in the overlying unstratified drift were some boulders of granite which must have come from distances of 60 miles at the least.*
(* Smith of Jordanhill, "Quarterly Journal of the Geological
Society" volume 6 1850 page 387.)
The presence of Tellina calcarea, and several other northern shells, implies a climate colder than that of the present Scottish seas. In the north of Scotland, marine shells have been found in deposits of the same age in Caithness and in Aberdeenshire at heights of 250 feet, and on the shores of the Moray Firth, as at Gamrie in Banff, at an elevation of 350 feet; and the stratified sands and beds of pebbles which belong to the same formation ascend still higher—to heights of 500 feet at least.*
(* Prestwich, "Proceedings of the Geological Society" volume
2 page 545; Jamieson, "Quarterly Journal of the Geological
Society" volume 16 1860.)
At much greater heights, stratified masses of drift occur in which hitherto no organic remains, whether of marine or freshwater animals, have ever been found. It is still an undecided question whether the origin of all such deposits in the Grampians can be explained without the intervention of the sea. One of the most conspicuous examples has been described by Mr. Jamieson as resting on the flank of a hill called Meal Uaine, in Perthshire, on the east side of the valley of the Tummel, just below Killiecrankie. It consists of perfectly horizontal strata, the lowest portion of them 300 feet above the river and 600 feet above the sea. From this elevation to an altitude of nearly 1200 feet the same series of strata is traceable, continuously, up the slope of the mountain, and some patches are seen here and there even as high as 1550 feet above the sea. They are made up in great part of finely laminated silt, alternating with coarser materials, through which stones from 4 to 5 feet in length are scattered. These large boulders, and some smaller ones, are polished on one or more sides, and marked with glacial striae. The subjacent rocks, also, of gneiss, mica slate, and quartz, are everywhere grooved and polished as if by the passage of a glacier.*
(* Jamieson, "Quarterly Journal of the Geological Society"
volume 16 1860 page 360.)
At one spot a vertical thickness of 130 feet of this series of strata is exposed to view by a mountain torrent, and in all more than 2000 layers of clay, sand, and gravel were counted, the whole evidently accumulated under water. Some beds consist of an impalpable mud, like putty, apparently derived from the grinding down of felspar, and resembling the mud produced by the grinding action of modern glaciers.
Mr. Jamieson, when he first gave an account of this drift, inferred, in spite of the absence of marine shells, that it implied the submergence of Scotland beneath the ocean after the commencement of the glacial period, or after the era of continental ice indicated by the subjacent floor of polished and grooved rock. This conclusion would require a submergence of the land as far up as 1550 feet above the present sea-level, after which a great re-upheaval must have occurred. But the same author, having lately revisited the valley of the Tummel, suggests another possible, and I think probable, explanation of the same phenomena. The stratified drift in question is situated in a deep depression between two buttresses of rock, and if an enormous glacier be supposed to have once filled the valley of the Tummel to the height of the stratified drift, it may have dammed up the mouth of a mountain torrent by a transverse barrier, giving rise to a deep pond, in which beds of clay and sand brought down by the waters of the torrent were deposited. Charpentier in his work on the Swiss glaciers has described many such receptacles of stratified matter now in progress, and due to such blockages, and he has pointed out the remnants of ancient and similar formations left by extinct glaciers of an earlier epoch. He specially notices that angular stones of various dimensions, often polished and striated, which rest on the glacier and are let fall when the torrent undermines the side of the moving ice, descend into the small lake and become interstratified with the gravel and fine sediment brought down by the torrent into the same.*
(* Charpentier, "Essai sur les Glaciers" page 63 1841.)
The evidence of the former sojourn of the sea upon the land after the commencement of the glacial period was formerly inferred from the height to which erratic blocks derived from distant regions could be traced, besides the want of conformity in the glacial furrows to the present contours of many of the valleys. Some of these phenomena may now, as we have seen, be accounted for by assuming that there was once a crust of ice resembling that now covering Greenland.
The Grampians in Forfarshire and in Perthshire are from 3000 to 4000 feet high. To the southward lies the broad and deep valley of Strathmore, and to the south of this again rise the Sidlaw Hills to the height of 1500 feet and upwards. On the highest summits of this chain, formed of sandstone and shale, and at various elevations, I have observed huge angular fragments of mica-schist, some 3 and others 15 feet in diameter, which have been conveyed for a distance of at least 15 miles from the nearest Grampian rocks from which they could have been detached. Others have been left strewed over the bottom of the large intervening vale of Strathmore.*
(* "Proceedings of the Geological Society" volume 3 page
344.)
It may be argued that the transportation of such blocks may have been due not to floating ice, but to a period when Strathmore was filled up with land ice, a current of which extended from the Perthshire Highlands to the summit of the Sidlaw Hills, and the total absence of marine or freshwater shells from all deposits, stratified or unstratified, which have any connection with these erratics in Forfarshire and Perthshire may be thought to favour such a theory.
But the same mode of transport can scarcely be imagined for those fragments of mica-schist, one of them weighing from 8 to 10 tons, which were observed much farther south by Mr. Maclaren on the Pentland Hills, near Edinburgh, at the height of 1100 feet above the sea, the nearest mountain composed of this formation being 50 miles distant.*
(* Maclaren, "Geology of Fife" etc. page 220.)
On the same hills, also, at all elevations, stratified gravels occur which, although devoid of shells, it seems hardly possible to refer to any but a marine origin.
Although I am willing, therefore, to concede that the glaciation of the Scotch mountains, at elevations exceeding 2000 feet, may be explained by land ice, it seems difficult not to embrace the conclusion that a subsidence took place not merely of 500 or 600 feet, as demonstrated by the marine shells, but to a much greater amount, as shown by the present position of erratics and some patches of stratified drift. The absence of marine shells at greater heights than 525 feet above the sea, will be treated of in a future chapter. It may in part, perhaps, be ascribed to the action of glaciers, which swept out marine strata from all the higher valleys, after the re-emergence of the land.
