On sections exposed in making a drain through the Queen’s Park at Holyrood

Abstract

For several months past operations have been going on in making a large drain to take the place of one that already exists in the Queen’s Park from the foot of Arthur Seat to the north end of the Park at Spring Gardens. When I first saw the excavations they were being carried across the park at the back of Holyrood Palace towards the north end of Salisbury Crags. The cutting for the drain when I first saw it was about 20 feet deep, mostly through sand, gravel, and boulder clay, but at the bottom of the section beds of the lower carboniferous rocks were exposed to a depth of about 5 or 6 feet. These consisted of brown, blue, and greenish shales, and thin beds of cherty sandstone dipping to the east-north-east at about 12 deg. They were exposed in this cutting for about 200 yards, and within a few yards of the north-east corner of the palace garden-wall several thin beds of black shale were exposed containing entomostraca and fragments of fish remains. The entomostraca, which were crowded in some of the layers of the shale, I submitted to Mr John Young of the Hunterian Museum, Glasgow, who identified them as belonging to two forms known in the carboniferous—viz., Cythere superba and Beyrichia subarcuata. Mr Young tells me that the first has been got in the shales north of Pittenweem and Craigkelly Quarry, Fifeshire, and at Oakbank sandstone Quarry, Linlithgowshire. The other, he says, is the first entomastracan