IV.—The Age of the “Pennine Chain.”

The “Pennine Chain” is the name (restored about fifty years ago by Conybeare and Phillips from the “Alpes Penini” of the Romans) for that hilly tract of country that stretches from the borders of Scotland on the North to the centre of Derbyshire on the South. This important range possesses the structure of a great, though complex, anticlinal, the result of a meridional movement of upheaval that took place at a remote period in the physical history of our island.This axis of elevation, which ranges a little west of Narth through North Derbyshire and Yorkshire, throws off the Coal-measures of Yorkshire and Derbyshire on the one side, and those of Lancashire and North Staffordshire on the other, with a steeper did on the West, and a gentler inclination on the East. The maximum of this upheaval is attained in North Derbyshire, where a dome-shaped mass of Mountain Limestone has been exposed at the surface at an altitude of 1500 feet above the sea.