South of Scotland 4th ed

This account describes the geology of Scotland northward from the border with England up to a line running roughly south-west from Dunbar, on the North Sea coast, to Girvan, on the Firth of Clyde (Figure 1). It covers Scotland’s two southernmost administrative regions: Dumfries & Galloway and Borders, thence extending northward to include parts of Strathclyde and Lothian. For much of its length the northern boundary line to the South of Scotland geological region coincides with the Southern Upland Fault, one of a series of major structures that partition mainland Scotland into five tectonic blocks known as terranes. The Southern Uplands form the southernmost of these but the north-west of the region described here extends beyond the Southern Upland Fault into the Girvan district, a part of the adjacent Midland Valley terrane. This allows the coeval Ordovician and Silurian successions of Girvan and the Southern Uplands to be integrated as part of the same geological exposition.