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On the Date of the Upheaval which caused the 25-feet Raised. Beaches in Central Scotland

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 September 2014

Robert Munro
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Extract

About forty-two years ago Mr Archibald Geikie (now Sir Archibald), then an energetic member on the staff of the Geological Survey, propounded and advocated the doctrine that the change in the relative level of sea and land, indicated by the 25-feet raised beaches which have been long known to geologists as fringing the winding shores of the firths of Central Scotland, took place subsequent to the occupation of the district by the Romans. Further researches, together with a more careful examination of the archaeological phenomena on which Sir Archibald mainly relied as evidence, convinced later observers that the facts did not justify this conclusion. Hence for some years I have been under the impression that the post-Roman theory was abandoned, not only by the general body of geologists and archaeologists, but, as I understood, by the author himself. The following statement of opinion on the subject, recently urged in the interests of the Trustees of the British Museum by a distinguished Professor of Geology, and one who has had exceptional opportunities of making himself conversant with all the factors of the problem, will, however, show how wide of the truth that impression must have been.

Type
Proceedings
Information
Proceedings of the Royal Society of Edinburgh , Volume 25 , Issue 1 , 1906 , pp. 242 - 272
Copyright
Copyright © Royal Society of Edinburgh 1906

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References

note * page 242 Evidence given in the recent case of the Attorney-General v. The Trustees of the British Museum with regard to the remarkable hoard of gold ornaments found near Lough Foyle, Ireland. (Times Law Reports, June 13, 1905.)Google Scholar

note * page 246 One of the Springfield group had a hole in its bottom said to contain a cork plug. The Clyde canoes were found at an average depth of 19 feet beneath the surface of the ground, and about 100 yards back from the original edge of the Clyde, chiefly in a thick bed of finely-laminated sand. (Smith's Newer Pliocene Geology, p. 163.)

note * page 252 On referring to the Ordnance map, I find the highest point to which the ordinary spring tides now flow is at a sluice in the Carron Ironworks, from which Camelon is less than a mile distant.

note * page 255 This object (fig. 2) is now in the National Museum of Antiquities, Edinburgh, and consists of a socketed spike, 11 inches in length, from the middle of which the hook curves backwards. The socket is formed by the backward folding of the iron, the edges only partially meeting, and in it the handle was fixed by a rivet. From its appearance, it might belong to comparatively recent times.

note * page 259 It appears that Sir Charles Lyell, in consequence of the articles of Mr Millie Home, abandoned the post-Roman theory, and accordingly his remarks on the subject were deleted from the fourth edition of his Antiquity of Man. Trans, of the Roy. Soc. Edin., vol. xxvii. pp. 39–41.

note * page 270 Proc. S.A. Scot., vol. xvi. p. 419.