On a section recently exposed at Marchmont Road

Abstract

My attention was directed in August 1883, by Messrs. Carfrae and Belfrage, C.E., to a section disclosed while excavating for the foundations of houses and for building stone on the east side of Marchmont Road, and at the south end of that street. The rocks disclosed belong to the red shale and clay series, so characteristic of the Lower Carboniferous series on the southern districts of Edinburgh. The section of rocks at four feet from the surface was as follows:— The general dip of the strata is north-west. The section coincides with one recorded by me twenty years ago, then seen in the Dick Place valley, when quarries were opened to supply building stones for mansions then being erected in that locality. The conglomerate there disclosed was similar in petrological constitution to the one now under examination; as, indeed, both are identical with that seen on the brow of the steep incline below Liberton Church, which was figured by Hay Cunningham as an outlier of the Old Red Sandstone system. Indeed, quarrymen tell me that the same bed lies