Castleton fossils and fossil collecting

Other Locations similar to Castleton

Castleton is an excellent location for corals, other similar locations for Carboniferous Corals are;Parkhouse Hill, Castleton, Portishead, Weston-Super-Mare in Avon. In South West Wales, you can also find Silurian Corals from Freshwater East, Marloes Sands. Mortimer Forest, Shadwell Quarry, Upper Millichope , Llanymynech Quarry, and Wenlock Quarry, Wenlock Edge in the Shropshire District.

Along the South West Coast, you can also collect Devonian Corals from Torquay along Hopes Nose and Daddy Hole. In Scotland, you can also find corals at St Monans. From South Wales, Carboniferous Corals can be found at Lydstep Headland, West Angle Bay and Manorbier Bay.

For Corals from Younger period, the Coralline Crag at Ramsholt makes ideal collecting.

Most of the fossils at Castleton are found in the loose scree and rocks. No hammering or collecting is permitted from this, but we recommend that you take a camera to photograph the wonderful fossils and minerals.

Within the limestone outcrops are found crinoid stem parts, brachiopods and corals. Trilobite pieces are rarely found. Small pieces of Blue John stone are also present within the soil and are revealed in areas where vegetation has been removed

Below Mam Tor the shales yield occasional plant fragments, but these are poorly preserved. Treak Cliff is largely covered in grass, with limestone outcrops occurring in only a few places. These are sometimes hard to reach due to the gradient of the hill but there are one or two outcrops alongside the path. Look at the surface of the limestone for fossils. Loose blocks can also be investigated where encountered.

If you keep your eyes on the floor as you walk along the Treak Cliff part of the path you may find a few pieces of Blue John. These can be purple, off yellow and clear in colour.

Derbyshire is divided into two general, geological regions. To the south, the “White Peak” comprises mostly Carboniferous limestones, and to the north, the “Dark Peak” is mainly shales and coarse sandstones known as “gritstone”. It is generally thought that, during Carboniferous times (330mya), the region was a shallow, tropical, marine environment roughly on or near the equator. It had some reefs and some deeper waters, and the occasional volcano or volcanic vents spewed lava onto the sea floor depositing thin bands of basalt. This environment lasted for a period of about 40 million years and formed limestone beds some 3km thick.

The Castleton area was then subject to uplifting that raised the limestones above sea level and subjected them to erosion. Not only did surface eroding take place, a complex series of small caverns, known as “pipes” were created by the natural process of “karst” cavern formation. The region was then re-submerged beneath the sea and was buried by shales and sandstones. These shales and sandstones formed a cap on the limestones trapping fluids within them. Then, about 270mya, as a result of major movement within the Earth’s crust, the whole area started to be pushed back up again, forming what we know today as the “Pennine Anticline”.

This uplifting caused the rocks to crack and opened gaps along a roughly east-west direction that were ready to be filled with minerals. Low temperature (130- 200°C) hydrothermal fluids trapped deep underground flowed in to the joints, cracks and pipes in the limestone, depositing fluorite, calcite, baryte and galena. Surface erosion and the formation of a second, large natural cavern system at the end of the last ice age series brings us to the present day....[more]

Bivalves are common here ....[more]