Pets Quarry

Also within

Cumbria County LAKE DISTRICT National Park

Condition (Natural England)

Geology & landscape

Mining / Industrial: Quarry · Geological Period: Ordovician

Landscape processes: Volcanic / Igneous

Description

Description Pets Quarry is a working quarry in the hillside above the Kirkstone Pass, about three kilometres north east of Ambleside. Rock faces and outcrops in the quarry provide important exposures of volcanic and sedimentary rocks of the Borrowdale Volcanic Group which form most of the highest mountains in the Lake District. It has been established recently that many of the so called lavas of the Borrowdale Volcanic Group, of Ordovician age, are in fact intrusions emplaced at a very high level into wet volcaniclastic lacustrine sediments. Evidence for such an interpretation is to be found at a number of sites in the Lake District, but Pets Quarry provides excellent exposures in which a variety of critical processes can be examined. As such it represents the most important single site supporting this hypotheses, one which has important implications in reconstructing the stratigraphic and magmatic history of the Borrowdale Volcanic Group.