The trench runs across the crest of the ‘Malvern Axis’, a major monoclinal fold trending north-south through central England that brings up Precambrian (~677 Ma; Cryogenian) to the surface. The Malvern line separates the two Precambrian terranes of the Midlands Microcraton, Wrekin Terrane to the west and Charnian Terrane to the east, that forms the solid basement of England. These Precambrian igneous rocks are unconformably overlain by Middle Cambrian Malvern Quartzite, and then Upper Silurian (Pridoli) Raglan Mudstone, and Upper Carboniferous (Moscovian) Halesowen Fm. This sequence was folded and thrust during the Variscan Orogeny at the end of the Carboniferous into the north-south Malvern Axis. Extension during the Triassic produced normal faulting along the Malvern Line and deposition of Middle Triassic (Anisian) Bromsgrove Sandstone to the east in the Worcester Graben. All this is being exposed in just one 100m trench, albeit somewhat tectonically shortened.

Standing on the axis, this is the view to the east. In the trench, the light coloured material in the foreground is Precambrian Malvern Complex, succeeded by grey/green and grey Carboniferous, red Silurian muds and Triassic sands towards the car.

To the west, the white is Cambrian followed by Carboniferous and Silurian on the other side of the axis. Note that many of the lithological identifications are still tentative.

The section is still in the process of being created and is on private land, but should be stunning when finished.

Garnet Hornblende Garbenschiefer from Lukmanier, Switzerland.

Almost thirty years ago I was fortunate enough to undertake my undergraduate geological mapping work for my degree dissertation in the Passo del Lucomagno / Lukmanier Pass region of Ticino, Switzerland. I have already talked about some of this in Accretionary Wedge #27 “Important Geological Experiences” and Accretionary Wedge #11 “Field camp”.

Google Earth view of my undergraduate mapping area at Lukmanierpass.

The topography, quite naturally for the Alps, was fairly severe, the campsite where I was staying at Acquacalda was at 1800m, the top of the ridge to the south was 2600m, and I had to descend 100m from the campsite before starting to climb up the other side. When working on the southern ridge it would take a couple of hours to walk up to the base of the ridge. I would then eat my lunch early, leave my rucksack and, travelling light, start to work my way up the side of the ridge carrying just my mapcase, notebook and compass-clinometer. I would spend the rest of the day working upwards until about four in the afternoon and then rapidly descend back to the campsite, collecting my rucksack along the way.

The south ridge of my mapping area from the campsite at Acquacalda

After about three weeks, about halfway through my stay there, I was working up to the south ridge. I had already ditched the rucksack but collected a fair sized sample of high-grade gneiss. I was crossing a boulder field and noticed an interesting looking exposure up a steep face to my right. I put my notebook down on a rock, placed my map case on top of it, and my gneiss sample on that to stop it blowing away. I then headed up to the steep outcrop with my compass-clinometer thinking I could easily remember a couple of readings and rock details and return to record the information in my notebook. At the exposure I took a couple of structural readings and then noticed that the rock structure looked even more interesting up and to my left. I traversed across and took another three readings, committing all five to memory.

I then turn round to return to my notebook. To my horror all I could see was a large boulder field. Although I had a luminous yellow field notebook, I had placed a grey map case on that, and then a large rock on top of that. They were perfectly camouflaged. I descended to where I thought I had left them and still couldn’t see them. I started to hunt for them. After an hour a mild panic started to set in. Had I just lost three weeks work down to my own stupidity? Since I knew that they had to be in the boulder field somewhere, I decided that the only solution was to criss-cross the boulder field in a grid search.

After another two hours without success, time was beginning to run out. As I was mapping alone, I had an agreement with the two others I was camping with and who were mapping adjacent areas, to meet up at 5pm. In the case of one of us not being there at that time, the other two would go out to look for them in case something had happened to them. I was going to have to give up soon to make the rendezvous deadline. My map and notebook could be ruined by weather if I left them out, even if I returned to find them the following day.

I decided to do just another couple of passes. And there they were, right in front of me, I practically walked into them. I was so relieved. I realised I was only 10m from where I thought I left them in the first place. I went back to that point and yes, I could see them from that point once I knew where they were, but the camouflage had been excellent. It was time to go back. But not before I had recorded the details of the outcrop including the five structural readings that had been burnt into my memory over the past three hours.

So, I haven’t ultimately left stuff behind on this occasion, but there is a follow up to the story. After my degree, I went to Cardiff to do a Ph.D. and I told the metamorphic petrology lecturer about the wonderful metamorphic rocks at Lukmanierpass, including hornblende garbenschiefer and kyanite schists that were so shiny you couldn’t look at them in the sun without sunglasses. I showed him the box of my rock samples that I had collected there. He asked if he could hang on to them for a while and I agreed. With the passing of my Ph.D. I completely forgot that I had lent him the rock samples. I moved on to Keele, and he moved on from Cardiff. I don’t know what happened to those rocks, but I do wish I hadn’t left them behind.

First, here is an exposure from last weekend’s Llangollen mapping course.

Folded cross beds and weird tafoni

Weirder still is the fact that the tafoni are not salt weathering related.

Second up, is something I put up for accretionary wedge 6 (things that make you go hmm – back in 2008) but I like it a lot so I’ll put it up again …

What happens to the orange sandstone and the faults?

You can see a wider view in the gigapan below.

Dinas Bran, Llangollen

From the first year geology field mapping training course this weekend. The remnants of Castell Dinas Bran, sitting atop Silurian siltstone. Taken from the Carboniferous Limestone escarpment.

Situated on the site of an Iron Age hillfort whose embankments can be seen on the slopes, the castle seen was probably built in the mid-1200′s and only occupied by the princes of Powys Fadog for a couple of decades before it was destroyed by fire in 1277 during the invasion by Edward I’s army.

Last weekend I was invited to attend the 11th Glacial Landsystems Working Group field meeting on the island of Anglesey in North Wales. As I said, a weekend of looking at ‘dirt’ wouldn’t normally appeal that much but it has been a very hard semester teaching so far so any excuse to get out in the field was good enough for me. We spent much of the first day looking at localities where the sea had cut sections through drumlins. There was some good discussion about whether the material in (or is it under?) the drumlin was actually glacial till. I think we decided it wasn’t.

However, it was on the second day where we visited a section with some unusual glaciotectonic features. This is the section at Lleiniog, on the shore of the Menai Straits through fluvioglacial sands and gravels.

The main gravel channel location would appear to be controlled by faulting on either margin. The faults are unusual in that they are near vertical. They are not strike-slip as the pebbles and cobbles can be seen to rotate into them on the left channel margin.

On the right-hand margin of the channel the faults have apparently rotated to that they now appear to have a reverse offset.

One theory for the formation of the structure is that the fluvioglacial sediments were deposited over a large block of ice which then melted out, causing the overlying sediments to collapse downward and channel concentrating in the still downfaulting region.

I’d like to thank the Glacial Landsystems Working Group for their hospitality over the weekend and I’ll finish the post with a couple of Anglesey coastal landscapes.

All three hundred deskcrop images can be found on my companion posterous blog and at my flickr site.

A google map with links to the geotagged images is embedded below.

View Rock365 in a larger map

Lockwood DeWitt at Outside the Interzone is hosting this month’s accretionary wedge where he asks “What is the most important geological experience you’ve had?”. The stress here is on the word important.

Picking the most important is incredibly difficult for me. I have been fortunate in my earlier career to have all sorts of important geological experiences, from climbing the summit of Mt Fuji in Japan to exploring the deepest wastes of the Atacama desert, from standing at the top of Monte Perdido in the Pyrenees to the bottom of the Black Canyon of the Gunnison in Colorado.

However, the most important for me has to be my undergraduate mapping in Lukmanierpass, Switzerland because it was important to me on so many different levels. I’ve already covered this way back in Accretionary Wedge 11, Field Camp, so I’ll try not to repeat myself too much.

The first part of the importance is because it was a turning point in my life, the point where I grew up. Up to that point I had had something of a sheltered upbringing. I had not travelled abroad except for a “De la Beche Club” (the student geology society at the Royal School of Mines) cycling geology field weekend in Northern France, and I certainly hadn’t been abroad alone. There were three of us sharing a large frame tent in Switzerland, but the car could only take two plus the tent, so I had to make my way there by train. The Swiss railway system is incredible and runs to the second. It was the first time that I saw proper mountains. The metre gauge train from Göschenen at the northern end of the Gotthard Tunnel climbing up to Andermatt is an experience in itself. Travelling alone across Europe gave me the confidence to go to so many other places since then.

(Note: I’ve converted these to black and white because the older colour photos have faded badly)

It was also the first time that I had done proper independent mapping. Prior to this our mapping training was done as buddy pairs but here I was on my own. We wouldn’t be allowed by health and safety regulations to do this today, which is a real shame because it was a wonderful experience. It was just me against the rock. I had to sort things out for myself. It took me about four weeks to work out why in one part of the area the bedding/cleavage relationship was telling me that the beds were upside-down where as I knew from the stratigraphy that they were the right-way up. It was a struggle, but I cracked it – myself.

The geology was incredible. I’ve never really seen anything like it before of since. The sediments trapped between the internal and external basement zones of the Alps exhibit one of the highest metamorphic gradients in the world with one unit going from amphibolite grade (shown above) to sub-phyllite in just a couple of kilometres. Some of the faces with white kyanite acted a mirrors in the bright sunlight. You couldn’t examine the mineral texture without sunglasses.

My last day in the field was my 20th birthday. After almost six weeks mapping, I had just one last valley to map. And, halfway up the valley I found a rock that I was not anticipating to find. This has taught me never to assume anything where mapping is involved and always check everything out. I had to work very hard to sort out that valley’s geology because I had a train booked home the following morning. I returned to camp absolutely exhausted but ultimately triumphant.

Google Earth view of my undergraduate mapping area, from the lake to the top of the ridge in the middle distance. The foreground ridge by the lake is Precambrian external zone basement gneiss and the middle distance ridge is Precambrian internal zone basement gneiss. Between them is a sliver of highly deformed and metamorphosed Mesozoic sedimentary cover rocks.

I’ll post more about the geology and some of the gigapans that I have shot in future posts when I have done the image processing but, in the mean time, here are a few scenic shots. Note that the weather was not always this good!

Rainbow at Whitesand Bay

St David's Head from Abereiddi Bay

Ramsey Island from St David's Head

Marloes Sands

Strumble Head from St David's Head

Skomer Island from Marloes

Higher resolution and other Pembrokeshire photos are in my Flickr Set.

Now that teaching and exams have finished for another year, thoughts turn to the field. Whilst the likes of Geotripper and Dr Jerque get to visit some spectaclur and unspoilt places, my field work takes me to somewhere interesting but not quite as pretty. These are Beech Caves in Staffordshire.

The caves aren’t natural but the result of mining the Triassic Bromsgrove Sandstone (formerly the Keuper Sandstone) for building stone. The pillar and stall workings were begun possibly in 1633 for the construction of the nearby Trentham Hall. The Trentham records for August 31st 1633 note a Roger Low being paid 22 pence per score for carrying 130 foot of stone from Beech.

Trentham Hall 1686 : Image source – Lost Heritage

This was the first of several halls at Trentham, being rebuilt in 1690 and again in the 1830s, ultimately becoming one of the finest buildings in England. Unfortunately, pollution from the growing Potteries conurbation filled the lakes with sewage and the magnificent hall was abandoned and demolished in 1912. The gardens did remain and now the lakes have been cleaned and the gardens refurbished (well worth a visit) there are plans to rebuild the hall as a five star hotel.

Beech Caves still show the evidence of the hand-pick marks by the miners as they followed a layer of pale-coloured sandstone dipping gently down into the hillside. The thick overburden made mining rather than quarrying a more attractive proposition.

In more recent times the caves were probably used as a munition store in the second world war but lately they have been used for raves and other undesirable activities. The caves are now litter strewn and graffiti covered. The land owner and the local council now want to block off the entrances to stop the ne’er-do-wells from getting in. However, in doing so, they will bury an important piece of Staffordshire’s geological history. It would be a great shame if these historic pillar and stall workings were lost. Whilst understanding the landowner’s concerns for the site, it is hoped that some limited, secure access can be maintained for historians and geologists alike.

Reference: Middleton T, 1986. A survey of Beech Cave, Staffordshire. Bulletin of the Peak District Mines Historical Society, 9, 401-403