A review of isolated data from the literature and our own observations make it possible to establish a model of the stratigraphical history of the Ordovician on the southern margin of the Brabant Massif. The succession is composed of seven informal formations, totalling a minimum of 2500 m of sediments, mainly comprising mudstones, siltstones and sandstones. This succession is compared and partly correlated with the sections observed in the adjoining areas, in the Bande de Sambre-et-Meuse, the Stavelot and Rocroi Massifs and the Remscheid–Altena and Ebbe anticlines (western Germany).

The Lake District and smaller Craven inliers of northwest England contain a Lower Palaeozoic sequence deposited on the Gondwanan side of the Iapetus Ocean, close to the junction with the Tornquist Sea. The Tremadoc to Llanvirn Skiddaw and Ingleton groups are deep water assemblages of turbidite, olistostrome and slump deposits, formed at a continental margin. They experienced uplift and erosion as a precursor to the eruption of two largely subaerial Llandeilo-Caradoc volcanic sequences: the tholeiitic Eycott Volcanic Group in the north and the calc–alkaline Borrowdale Volcanic Group in the central Lake District. The volcanic episodes are the earliest part of a major episode of magmatism, extending through to the early Devonian and responsible for a major batholith underpinning the Lake District. Subsidence in an intra-arc rift zone preserved the subaerial volcanic sequences. A marine transgression marks the base of the Windermere Group, which comprises a mixed carbonate–clastic shelf sequence of Ashgill age, passing upwards through the Silurian into a thick, prograding foreland basin sequence of Ludlow turbidites. Deformation of the Lower Palaeozoic sequences was possibly diachronous from north to south. It is attributed to the late Caledonian (Acadian) Orogeny and resulted in folding, cleavage and thrust development. Granitic intrusions, including those at Shap, Skiddaw and beneath the hydrothermal Crummock Water Aureole, are partly syntectonic and were therefore penecontemporaneous with this deformation event. Some thrust faulting post-dates the intrusive phase. Post-deformation Devonian conglomerates are also present locally.

Borehole evidence from the Isle of Rügen, and geophysical data from the adjacent Baltic Sea suggest a Caledonian deformation front that caused NNE-directed thrusting on the East European Platform. It is thought to mark a Caledonian suture zone which was reactivated in syn- to post-Variscan events to form the Rømiø-Møn Fault Zone.