The weather was nice enough over the Easter weekend for a short walk at Cove harbour, some 12km down the coast from Dunbar.
Cove is one of those places where you really feel surrounded by the geology and get a visceral sense of the depth of geological time. The rocks on this stretch of the coast are mostly sandstone and mostly date back to the early part of the Carboniferous period. They are full of nice examples of cross bedding:
This is one of the nicest bits, although, given that it has fallen off the cliff, it is not much use for working out which way the palaeocurrent was flowing. In addition to such small-scale features, one can also see how the strata are bent and distorted on a much larger scale. The curvature and dip of what were once flat horizontal beds seems quite dramatic when you are standing on the harbour wall, but I wasn’t sure how to get a good picture of it. One answer was to continue the walk to a point where it was possible to walk up to the cliff top and return that way to the carpark; you get a nice view of the curved layers from the clifftop path.
