First impressions of England and its people / By Hugh Miller.

  • Hugh Miller
Date:
1847
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: First impressions of England and its people / By Hugh Miller. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    30/440 page 6
    department, would liave proved greatly an overmatch for them in the end. The wilder tracts of Northumberland are composed of the Millstone Grit and Mountain Limestone; and never before had I seen this latter deposit developed in a style that so bears out the appropriateness of its name. It is in Northumberland, what it is rarely or never in Scotland, a true Mountain Lime¬ stone, that rises into tall hills, and sinks into deep valleys, and spreads laterally over a vast extent of area. The ocean of the Cai'boniferous era in England must have been greatly more persistent and extended than the ocean whose deposits form the base of the Coal Measures in the sister country : it appears to have lain farther from the contemporary land, and to have been much less the subject of alternate upheavals and depressions. We were several hours in driving over the for¬ mation. As we entered upon the true Coal Measures, the face of the country at once altered : the wild, open, undulating surface sunk into a plain, laid out, far as the eye could reach, into fields, still wretchedly green, and closely reticulated with hedge-rows ; the farm-houses and gentlemen s seats thickened as we advanced; and England assumed its proper character. With a change of scenery, however, we experienced a change of weather. We had entered into the cloud that seemed so threatening in the distance from the top of Carter Fell; and a thick, soaking rain, without wind, accompanied by a lazy fog that lay scattered along the fields and woods in detached wreaths of gray, saddened the landscape. As Ave drove on, Ave could see the dense smoke of the pit-engines forming a iieAv feature in the prospect; the tall chimneys of NeAvcastle, that seemed so many soot-black obelisks, half lost in the turbid at¬ mosphere, came next in view ; and then, just as the evening Avas falling Avet and cheerless, Ave entered the toAvn, through
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