Old Red Sandstone in Aberdeen and the neighbourhood

Abstract

The Old Red Sandstone is regarded as a lacustrine deposit, and on diagrams giving hypothetical restorations of the north east of Scotland in Old Red Sandstone times several lakes are outlined determined by numerous traces of Old Red Sandstone in Kincardine, Aberdeen, and Banff. I am inclined to think that all the deposits seen between the Firth of Tay and Lerwick belong to one basin. At present the Old Red Sandstone is seen on the coast between the point on the south side of the mouth of the Firth of Tay and Cowie Chapel, a mill north of Stonehaven. There it now ends, but without doubt at one time it extended farther north. It does not terminate there naturally, thinning out on a shore but is cut off by a fault, on the south side of which it has dropped down. There is also evidence of great waste of the shore of Forfar. The Bell Rock is a reef of Old Red Sandstone, now eleven miles from the coast at Arbroath. At one time the coast line must have been outside the Bell Rock, and it is fair to conclude that there had been a like waste on the Kincardine coast, if it had had a fringe of Old Red Sandstone and this I believe it once had. In a cleft in the rocks on the coast between the villages of Findon and Cove, Old Red Conglomerate is still to be seen, eight miles north of Cowie Chapel and within