Town Geology by Charles Kingsley — Read

This is a large subject. For in the different towns of these islands, the walls are built of stones of almost every age, from the earliest to the latest; and the town-geologist may find a quite different problem to solve in the nearest wall, on moving from one town to another twenty miles off. All I can do, therefore, is to take one set of towns, in the walls of which one sort of stones is commonly found, and talk of them; taking care, of course, to choose a stone which is widely distributed. And such, I think, we can find in the so-called New Red sandstone, which, with its attendant marls, covers a vast tract -- and that a rich and busy one -- of England.

From Hartlepool and the mouth of the Tees, down through Yorkshire and Nottinghamshire; over the manufacturing districts of central England; down the valley of the Severn; past Bristol and the Somersetshire flats to Torquay in South Devon; up north-westward through Shropshire and Cheshire; past Liverpool and northward through Lancashire; reappearing again, north of the Lake mountains, about Carlisle and the Scotch side of the Solway Frith, stretches the New Red sandstone plain, from under which everywhere the coal-bearing rocks rise as from a sea. It contains, in many places, excellent quarries of building-stone; the most famous of which, perhaps, are the well-known Runcorn quarries, near Liverpool, from which the old Romans brought the material for the walls and temples of ancient Chester, and from which the stone for the restoration of Chester Cathedral is being taken at this day.