Early publications on the stratigraphy of the northern Pennines at the turn of the nineteenth century and the first long stratigraphic sections

Detailed stratigraphic sections recorded by the mining industry in Great Britain were first published during the eighteenth century. In the northern Pennines, Forster presented the first representative long composite stratigraphic section in 1809. It encompassed the entire known Carboniferous (as it was later named) succession, with the portion representing the lead mining district summarizing ‘a sequence worked out during many centuries of lead mining’. Three other shorter sections, also compiled from mining industry data and dating to between 1785 and 1800, had been published previously, with limited circulation. While the lateral continuity of the geology results in a broad similarity across all of the early sections, same-scale comparison combined with contemporary accounts constrains locations of the source data. A recent assertion that an unpublished composite section presented by Walton in 1793 to the Literary and Philosophical Society of Newcastle upon Tyne was the first ‘stratigraphical section of the lead mining districts’ with ‘Hutchinson, Millar and then Forster later using his work without acknowledgement’ is shown to be incorrect. The interest of Sir Joseph Banks in the emergence of stratigraphic geology in this period suggests that he may have been the enigmatic ‘A Constant Reader’ who corresponded on the topic of these early sections in the Philosophical Magazine. Forster's 1809 publication was the first concise synthesis of the Pennines Carboniferous, making ‘the miners' succession’ more widely accessible and providing a basis for later work.