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

  • Miller, Hugh, 1802-1856.
Date:
1847
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

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

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    naileresses were really very pretty. Cecilia, a rudely blonde, was fabricating tackets; and Delia, a briglit-eyed brunette, en- ofagfed in heading: a double-double. Ere entering on the grounds, however, I must attempt doing what Dodsley has failed to do,—I must try whether I cannot give the reader some idea of the Leasowes as a whole, in their relation to the surrounding country. Let us, then, once more return to the three Silurian eminences that rise island-like from the basin of the Dudley coal-field, and the parallel line of trap hills that stretches away amid the New Red Sandstone. I have described the lines as parallel, but, like the outstretched sides of a parallel ruler, not opposite. There joins on, how¬ ever, to the Silurian line,—like a prolongation of one of the right lines of the mathematician indicated by dots,—an exten¬ sion of the chain, not Silurian, which consists of eminences of a flatter and humbler character than either the Wren’s Nest or the Castle Hill, and which runs opposite to the trap chain for several miles. One of these supplementary eminences,— the one adjoining the Castle Hill,—is composed of the trap to which the entire line owes its elevation; and a tall, cairn¬ like group of apparent boulders, that seem as if they had been piled up by giants, but are mere components of a partially disintegrated projection from the rock below, occupies its sum¬ mit. In the flat hill directly beyond it, though the trap does not appear, it has tilted up the Lower Coal Measures saddle- wise on its back, amid the surrounding New Red Sandstone ; the strata shelve downwards on both sides from the anticlinal line atop, like the opposite sides of a roof from the ridge ; and the entire hill, to use a still humbler illustration, resembles a huge blister in new plaster, formed by the expansion of some fragment of unslaked lime in the ground-coating beneath.