Carrock Fell, June-September 2009 – Part II mapping project Last summer I went to the English Lake District and mapped Carrock Fell, a 660-metre hill, and some of the surrounding fell-sides. I was based at a very nice campsite* (in a caravan) just off the main road half way between Penrith and Keswick, and the mapping area was half-an-hour bike ride to the north. The area is visited Conveniently I could cycle along tracks and bridleways quite far into the mapping area in several different places so there wasn’t also a long walk at the start of each day to find somewhere new or interesting to look at! View to E along River Caldew. Carrock Fell on left of photo, Bowscale fell on the right. * Which I would highly recommend to anyone visiting the area – excellent showers, friendly staff, a 30 minute bus ride from Penrith and Keswick, with most of the ‘Northern Fells’ according to Wainwright within walking (if not cycling) distance. For caravans, static caravans and tents†. http://www.campingandcaravanningclub.co.uk/siteseeker/aspx/details.aspx?id=9010 † Incidentally, I’m not on a commission. Unfortunately I did not take a camera with me during mapping, as I would have ended up spending all of my time taking wildlife photos instead of mapping, but as part of the area was visited on the Part IB field trip to Sedbergh, the photos included in this report are from then. I was mainly lucky with the weather, with only a couple of days’ rain; I missed the really bad stuff in August as I was away in Tanzania (as it turns out, four weeks climbing Lakeland fells actually is good training for something like Kilimanjaro). View to SW along River Caldew, just downstream of the junction with Grainsgill Beck. The hill visible is un- named. The person on the far right in the orange T-shirt is in fact me! * ‘Biotite quartz gabbro,’ ‘microgabbro and ferromicrogabbro,’ ‘gabbro and noritic gabbro and poikolitic leucogabbro,’ ‘gabbro and hornfelsed contact gabbro,’ ‘dolerite,’ ‘diorite and microdiorite,’ and ‘apatite-bearing ferrodiorite series’ were all present according to BGS. Have fun with those in hand specimen in an area where you’re not really supposed to use a hammer. The geology was interesting. The north of the area is an igneous complex, with layered gabbros and microgranite. My gabbro units were subdivided far less than BGS would claim, but I think a microscope and many more thin sections than I had available would have been required to resolve the differences they explained*. There were lots of abandoned mine shafts, some vertical, some horizontal or gently sloping, which I most definitely did not venture along with a torch to much better constrain contacts and have a general explore. To the south of this is a large area of highly folded metasediments, with a granitic intrusion – the intrusion being that which was mapped on the earlier Sedbergh field trip. The rocks were all very similar and the interesting features were the folding (easily measured due to strong laminations) and the ‘spotted’ appearance of some of the rocks – deduced to be due to contact metamorphism with the granite. I managed to not significantly injure myself falling 20 metres (vertical distance) down a 60-degree crag-and- boulder-strewn slope in the cirque around Bowscale Tarn which was a bonus, and gave me an opportunity to entertain the Department Health & Safety officer with my ‘sketch of the incident.’ Though I wouldn’t choose to map by myself again (and only did this time out of necessity) I did on balance enjoy the project. If I could go back to the start I would probably not map the same area, and instead choose somewhere a lot more sedimentary as we have had a lot more experience mapping that sort of thing on field trips and so on. The financial contribution from the fund you organised really made a difference to my project, and I am very grateful indeed. I will definitely make an effort (some others have already said they want to do it too) to make a similar fund from people in my year group when we graduate..