Scottish coal seam names and correlations

This report correlates the coals in the Scottish Coalfield and provides a key by which local coals, and their local names, can be fitted in to the BGS Carboniferous Stratigraphy. It attempts to collect together all the various seam names, correlations and aliases for coal seams. This information was collected from documents completed by BGS palaeontology, BGS reports and memoirs, NCB/British Coal sections, other external coal publications plus my own personal knowledge within the Scottish Coalfields. It includes the Sanquhar coalfield but does not take into consideration coalfields at Machrihanish, Brora and a few other isolated small coalfields. The spreadsheet shows: 1. An indication of where the coal seam name first originated. (they could also be within other sources) denoted by colour of lines round spreadsheet cells 2. Speckled cells show correlations within areas. 3. Solid lines round hatched or speckled boxes show known correlations whereas dashed line indicate possible correlations. 4. Horizontal lines in cells show BGS correlation across different areas. 5. Vertical lines in cells indicate NCB/Coal Authority correlations across areas. 6. Cross hatching indicates agreement with BGS and NCB/Coal Authority correlations The spreadsheet was initially created to try to show where every coal seam name on any coal plan or publication was located within the geological strata for any area within the Scottish Coalfield (Figure 1). Correlations for the coal seams within the same area and in different areas were added later. As it was impossible to have headings for every area in Scotland, all the coal seam names in a column may not exist in the places listed at the heading as the seam names are merely within any location name in the headed areas.