Time-travelling by train - Carlisle to Settle

These podcasts originally started as abstracts from some of the 260 places in the 5 rock books. They are themed differently to the books – by geological time, the relevance of rocks and most recently Series 3 and 4 took journeys along Hadrian’s frontier and down the 4 big northern rivers. Along the way podcasts have been evolving and some other geology not in the books has been getting a mention. 

My thinking is to continue that trend - , but first of all to do a taster – a bit of an easy cheat really because this trial episode draws heavily on an article I wrote for the Friends of the Settle to Carlisle Railway Line last year.

If it works I will add some more podcasts to series 5, but because I will have to do a bit of travelling and writing they will probably appear interleaved with other stories in other different series – I’m working on the assumption that you listeners will just pick and choose from the series you want to hear. Shout if I haven’t got that right.  

You might think that’s more than enough of a prelude – but there’s more. Let’s do that on board the train.

Transcript

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Series 5. Time traveling trains. Episode 1. Carlisle to Settle. These podcasts originally started as abstracts from some of the 260 places in the Five Rock Books. They are themed differently to the books by geological time, the relevance of rocks, and most recently series three and four took journeys along Hadrian's frontier and down the four big northern rivers. Along the way, the podcasts have been evolving, and some other geology, not in the books, has been getting a mention. My thinking is to continue that trend, but first of all to do a taster. A bit of an easy cheat, really, because this trial episode draws heavily on an article I wrote for the Friends of the Carlisle to Settle railway line last year. If it works, I'll add some more podcasts to series five. But because I'll have to do a bit of travelling and writing, they will probably appear interleaved with other stories in different series. I'm sorry if that's complicated, but I'm working on the assumption that you listeners will just pick and choose from the series you want to hear. You'll shout if I haven't got that right, won't you? You might think that's more than enough of a prelude, but there's another one. Let's do that on board the train. Folks are chatting, busy on their phones and laptops, people watching or just reading books. I don't think I've ever managed to really read a book on a train. I'm a window gazer. The change in views have me mesmerized. I've always loved landscapes, and after listening to a BBC School's radio programme called How Things Began around 1959, I developed an all-consuming interest in landscape origins. The past, the distant past. So by now, if you didn't already know, you'll have guessed two things. I'm old and I'm a geologist. I've always been curious about why my little northern bit of the earth is like it is. I'm sorry history and archaeology buffs, but that's not so much the surface stuff as humans have tinkered with over the last eight thousand years as we've farmed and built on it, but the full time dimension of the North's landscape, all four hundred and eighty-five million years of it. The human bit is, well, superficial, cosmetic if you like, and true beauty is, as they say, more than skin deep. What I'm really putting up front is a health and safety notice. While we may be travelling on a bit of the much loved historic human infrastructure, the Settled to Carlisle Rail Line, the rest of this article is dedicated to a much longer view of time. There's another health warning. Geology is an interpretive science, variable amounts of facts and expertise, and a lot of inference. Britain's landscapes are not like the places where rocks stick out in the world, Utah and the Himalayas, for example. Mostly, our rocks are covered in soil, vegetation and tarmac. So we British geologists are like detectives looking for clues. Vera would have made an okay geologist. Still with me? Great. You're going to get a geologist's eye view of a journey on the Carlisle to Settle rail line. We are about to head south out of Carlisle Station and do some serious time travelling. No TARDIS required. The 824 AM Northern Service to Settle will do just fine. As we are starting in the north, we are, broadly at least, going to be travelling back in time. Set down your book and your phone, look out of the window. Even before the driver moves the train we have our first clue. The stone Carlisle station is built of, it's local. Red Permian sandstones from Penrith and the Eden Valley. These rocks were once sand grains blowing around as dunes in the desert two hundred and seventy five million years ago. We were more like Saudi Arabia then, in environment and latitude. But I'm getting ahead of myself. Once we've left the Carlisle suburbs behind, we're into hummocky, verdant pastures. No red rock to be seen, well yet. It's buried under clay, silt, sands, and stones left by the last ice sheet twenty thousand years ago. Soon enough we get a glimpse east, that's the left window, of the River Eden, which has cut a deep valley here and there and exposes those sandstones. The rail line does the same. We speed through rock cuttings as the train heads through Armouthwaite, Lazenby and Langwathby. Did he notice that all those stations are still built of local red sandstone? There were fleeting glimpses of other fascinating, well, it's fascinating to me, geological stuff too, brief views of the floodplain of the River Eden, sand and silt deposited in the last ten thousand years. We can see the Pennine Hills and its older Carboniferous rocks, a 300 meter scarp caused by the Pennine boundary fault, our equivalent of the San Andreas, and it still moves and had a little earthquake in the 1970s. We can see the conical hills of Nock, Dufton and Merton Pikes, much eroded and dislocated remnants of older Ordovician rocks of the Lake District. You can see the lake district occasionally visible in the west. Did you spot the gorge of High Cup Nick and its lip of Windsill, the same rock as Hadrian's Wall is built on? An industrial history buff would have been on the lookout for the old long megged gypsum mine and its siding, but no one can miss the British gypsum factory mines and conveyors of Kirby Thor. Two hundred and seventy million years ago, the gypsum was salt in a sea that was continually filling up and drying out. While we're digressing into economic geology, did you notice how many of the cutting slopes we've been through were covered in blankets of rocks or gabian baskets? The sides are susceptible to landslips and rock falls and need protecting. I bet you didn't look at the rail ballast either. We've been travelling along it for a while. It's usually crushed granite, an ancient once molten rock. Back to our journey. After Appleby, the landscape becomes more rolling, and the field walls are starting to look a bit grey. We're entering Carboniferous country. The rock here, limestone, was three hundred and thirty million years ago, limey mud in a warm coral sea. Our bit of the Earth's crust we now call Britain was at that time just about on the equator. Limestone was once marine animals, crushed shells and plankton. That's why you find fossils in it. As we head south we've travelled back another sixty million years, but you'd be hard pressed to see that change in the undulating green fields. It's the walls and stream gorges and cuttings that are clues. Kirby Stevens Station comes into our aid too. It's built not of red permiant sandstone, but the grey brown carboniferous variety. The next section of the journey to Garsdale takes us into the landscape that makes Settlett Carlisle one of the great railway journeys of the world. The views as we climb up Malastang Valley to the Aesgill summit and beyond are breathtaking. The valley is overlooked by high seat in the east and wild boar fell in the west. These fells, just like Inglebrh and Penygent, are perfect examples of the way rocks are the prime influence on the landscape. The hard carboniferous sandstone and limestone strata alternate with soft shale layers. Erosion by glaciers in the last glaciation scoured the hillsides and created the classical horizontal bench and steep scarp profiles. You can see those same alternations, the influence of hard and soft rocks in the many waterfalls of the stream in the valley sides. Not all the hillsides are like these. Many have irregular humps, bumps, and hollows. They are covered by stony clay smeared by the ice, which with the rock debris then slowly slump down the slopes, a process encouraged by thousands of years of freeze and thaw in the tundra conditions that followed the ice age. In the last ten thousand years, in many of the hollows and on the hilltops, thick peat formed to create the mires and mosses that make for such rich habitats for wildlife and wet feet for walkers. From Garsdale to Dent and Dent to Ribblehead, the beautiful rock-influenced scenery keeps on coming. It's impossible to choose between left or right windows. Soon we enter the Bleamer Tunnel, over two kilometres of extraction of younger Carboniferous sedimentary rock that we can't see. But look to the west of the entrance. Did you spot how many tons of now grass over spoil they dragged out of that tunnel? It's a j it's a downhill journey now, so we're travelling through older rocks again, more limestone country, the same age as the rocks near Kirby Stephen. They are obvious as pale grey outcrops, walls and buildings that reflect the sunlight, well, the sunlight today at least. We've swapped moorland for green pastures too, and many of those fields have rows of sink or swallow holes, places where water has dissolved the limestone and the ground beneath has collapsed. Look west of the Ribblehead Viaduct for some great examples. At Horton, and before we approach settle, we encounter the oldest rocks on our journey, vertical and broken rocks that look every bit of their four hundred and seventy-five million years. These are ancient sandstones and siltstones, from a time when the piece of the crust we now call Britain was at the bottom of an ocean and between the equator and the South Pole. These are Ordovician and slightly younger Silurian periods of Earth's history. But these rocks don't last long, and now you've got your eye in, you will immediately have recognised that for the last few minutes of our journey we're back in the limestone country and its iconic town and our last stop. Settle. Do you feel like a five mile walk to stretch your legs before you catch the return hut journey home? A final and very recent geological tale to round off the day. Let's head up to Victoria Cave, a limestone cavern above the town, where, a hundred and fifty-five years ago, geologists discovered the bones of elephants, rhinos, hippos, and hyenas. Their finds became central to one of the great nineteenth century debates and changed forever how the world understood past climates and environments, and debunked any literal interpretation of the biblical story of Noah's Great Flood. Next time you're on a train and engrossed in a book, spare a thought for that person opposite staring out the window. They may look as if they're wondering what's for tea, but they may well be puzzling where that hill is and what lies beneath it. There's a final revelation. As a boy I travelled this railway by steam train every year for more than a decade. We lived in Carlisle, my grandparents lived in Hull, and it was looking out the window back then that fed my passion for our stunning northern landscapes and their origin. The Settle Carlisle Line shares the blame, or is it the credit, for my devotion to rocks? So, you friends of the Settle Carlisle Line, you only have yourselves to blame if anyone else is similarly inspired.