On the Sequence of the Permian Rocks Near Ripon

There is considerable difficulty in determining with certainty the bottom beds of the Permian Rocks, near Ripon. Some beds, indeed, are seen to rest unconformably upon the Plumpton Rocks, as in Studley grounds beneath the ‘Surprise,’ near the Abbey, and at Knaresbro’. But these seem to me not to be actually the lowest beds of all, though, of course, they are the lowest in those places. Other beds occur as at Nordhouse, in Aldfield, and Well; which cannot be assigned to any position among the rocks which appear in these three places, or in the rocks above them, and must, therefore, have an horizon below. The Carboniferous Rocks had suffered immense denudation before the Permian period. If the Coal Measures ever existed in this neighbourhood (which I doubt), they had all been washed away, and much of the underlying millstone grit. If they did not exist, then the grit must have been exposed during the whole period of the Coal Measures to aerial denudation, and the consequence must have been the formation of considerable river-valleys, into which, as the land was sinking during the Permian period the sea flowed, and the earliest deposits would naturally be made in these ancient valleys. In lithological character also, as well as in the manner in which the fossils are preserved, the beds at Aldfield and Well, differ from the rest of the Permian series. At Well, the fossils seem chiefly to consist of Producta horrida; at Aldfield I have found more than twenty ...