Old Mines and Carboniferous limestone at Hodbarrow, Near Millom
Led by David Kelly on 13th August 2016
David led 20 of us past the remains of the Hodbarrow Mine on a dry breezy day. Its main ore body, the largest in Cumbria, measured 600m x 600m x 30m and was close to sea level. At first we walked along the flexible Outer Barrier with its watertight puddled clay core skirting the smaller Moorbanks ore body. The rigid Inner Barrier had failed so the main orebody area had flooded when the mine was abandoned. Our lunch stop was in the Red Hills Quarry in the eponymous highly dolomitised limestone. The beach at Haverigg Point had a very varied mixture of interesting erratics and highly coloured furnace slag and clinker. Our final stop was a fossiliferous locality in the Red Hill Limestone exposed in the faulted anticline. It had thumb length crinoid columnals and tennis ball cross sections of gastropods.
Mervyn Dodd