A landscape soaked in history
Why are the mountains and lakes here, how did they get here, why are there so many different types of rock and why don’t the lakes drain away?
Questions questions... here’s a little geology to explain how the Lake District was formed.
It took 500 million years to make this landscape. Sediments in oceans and seas made the slate, limestone was formed from dead crustaceans and desert conditions created sandstone. And in between volcanoes erupted and minerals were formed in the joints and faults in the bedrock.
22 Keswick Holiday Guide 2012
The different layers of rock were firstly folded and shifted about and later sculpted by glaciers and meltwater to give us the familiar shapes, fells and valleys we enjoy today.
This means the Lake District has a very interesting contrast of smooth U-shaped valleys (like Honister) and steep sharp ridges (like Sharp Edge on Blencathra), England’s highest mountain (Scafell Pike) and the deepest lake (Wastwater) and longest lake (Windermere).
Keswick has the oldest rocks in the Lake District in the form of the Skiddaw Group. These were formed as black muds and sands settling on the seabed 500 million years ago, then they were raised up and squeezed to form mainly smooth
mountains. Since then streams have cut the deep gorges we admire today.
The rock to east and south of Borrowdale is Volcanic - where very hard lavas and ashes formed in catastrophic eruptions about 450 million years ago. They left us with the craggiest mountains of Scafell, Helvellyn and the Langdales. These mountains are not the original volcanoes but much harder rocks that stood up to erosion.
And the lakes themselves, well, the volcanic rock doesn’t allow the water to seep away and that combined with high rainfall means the deep glacial valleys keep the lakes.
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