Chapter 17 Collaborating on the Windermeres

Abstract

Abstract We have already seen in Chapter 13 how the stratigraphic divisions of the Windermere Group or Supergroup were elaborated in the latter part of the twentieth century, but there are still major questions to be asked about this large basin of sediments, its structure and its tectonic history. In particular, why is there the strange contact with the Borrowdale Volcanics, with the Windermere sediments evidently unconformable thereto, but also reared up against it, as at Timley Knott (see Fig. 13.1), with other parts of the contact also displaying significant faulting. How did this come about? Also, did the Windermeres1 formerly go right over the BVG (which they seem, from Timley Knott, to have been trying to do)? Perhaps they did, given the evidence of the Dry gill Shales or the occurrence of Coniston Grits in the Mell Fell Conglomerate of the northern Lakes. Or did they 'go round' the mountains only? If they went over the Volcanics, were they folded over, or were they deposited in such a thick sequence that they smothered them entirely? Or were the Volcanics largely eroded away before the deposition of the Windermeres? The 'Otley III' sediments are evidently thick. But how thick? And what were the reasons, in terms of the tectonic history of northern England, for the formation of a basin such as could accommodate the large mass of sediments? Where did these sediments originate? And then what caused the subsequent inversion of the basin so as to bring the sediments into view?