Scotland

Scottland has no famous karst areas, as a matter of fact Scotland is the last remains of an ancient orogeny which mostly crystalline rocks. Despite being geologically very interesting, this area is built of crystalline, metamorphic and insoluble sedimentary rocks like old red, a famous red sandstone. Scotland has small patches of marble karst, some tectonic caves and numerous small sea caves along the coast.

The most interesting karst area in Scotland is Assynt, a small belt of marble, metamorphic limestone, which contains numerous narrow but rather long river caves. This belt runs north from Ullapool to the northern coast. Here, at the coast, Smoo Cave is located, a combination of karst cave and sea cave, and Scotland's only show cave.

Other small caves are interesting primarily because of their historic background, like St Ninian's Cave and King's Cave.

Scotland is the remains of old mountains, and this geologic history produced several valuable ores. Mines of Scotland produced iron and coal. Some of them are open to the public now.

Literature

Tony Oldham (2005): The Caves of South Western Scotland, 28 pp, 10 colour photos, including front cover. Laminated covers. GBP 5.
This is a detailed gazetteer covering the area Dumfries-shire, Galloway, Kircudbrightshire and Wigtownshire. This area is famous for its inhabited caves which date from Bronze Age times. St Medan's and St Ninian's Caves were inhabited in the 8th century, whilst the most notorious inhabitant in the 16th century was Sawney Beane and his family who is reputed to have robbed and eaten over a 1000 travellers. The only caving guide to this little known caving area.
Tony Oldham (2005): The Mines of South Western Scotland, 35 pp, 5 surveys cum location maps, 18 colour photos including colour front and rear covers. Laminated covers. GBP 5.
The mines of south-western Scotland are virtually unknown to most of the inhabitants of England and Wales. In many ways it is a lost and forgotten area. An area of wild beauty, noted more for its agriculture and scenery than for its industries. It has never been of great importance as a centre of mining; nevertheless the scattered occurrences of metalliferous ores that have been worked from time to time are relatively poorly covered in literature. The two main works by G V Wilson (1921) and James R Foster-Smith (1967) are long out of print and difficult to obtain. This present work hopes to overcome this problem by recording those deposits, which are known to exist, and which have been worked or investigated in past times. There is no active mining in the area at present, though some small-scale mining continued as late as 1954.

See also
Search Google for "Scotland cave"

Index Counties England Scotland Wales Maps Geology Map Limestone Map