The Red Rocks near Bunmahon on the Coast of Co. Waterford

Abstract

There are a few patches of red sandstone, shale, and conglomerate on the coast of Co. Waterford whose age has been the subject of much divergence of opinion, owing to the obscurity of their stratigraphical relations and isolated positions. A recent visit which I paid to these parts enabled me to collect evidence which seems to my mind to settle their age conclusively. The earliest description of these rocks with which I am acquainted was published by Mr. J. Hodgson Holdsworth in 1833. He maintained the view that they were of the same age as the ‘great conglomerate-formation’ of the Monovoulagh or Comeragh Mountains, which he rightly ascribed to the Old Red Sandstone. He pointed out also the fact that they rest unconformably on the ‘Silurian’ rocks. The next mention of these beds is by Mr. T. Weaver in 1835, when he described a gradual passage from the greenstone rocks into the red sandstone ‘through the medium of a compound conglomerate’ of greenstone with red sandstone-fragments and of red sandstone with greenstone-fragments. Thus he apparently favoured the view of their ‘Silurian’ age. Mr. J. Beete Jukes in 1852 put forward the view that these patches were blocks of Old Red Sandstone let into the ‘Silurian’ rocks of the coast by complicated faults. In 1860 Messrs. W. B. Brownrigg and Theo. Cooke, in a brief description of the coast, accepted the view that these patches are faulted masses of Old Red Sandstone. In the Geological Survey memoir of this district