Glencoul

One of the World's great tectonic landscapes - of the Glencoul Thrust - and outcrops of mylonites that have inspired pioneering studies of crystalline plasticity and shear zone kinematics.

This site provides one of the most informative sections across the Moine Thrust Belt, inspiring the first use of the term "thrust" (as a verb, by Callaway in 1883). To the west, the foreland beneath the Thrust Belt, shows the typical Lewisian-Torridonian-Cambrian sequence and the finest example of the "double unconformity". Eastwards, a well-exposed zone of imbrication is developed in Cambrian strata between the Sole Thrust and the Glencoul Thrust. The latter is magnificently exposed in the classic section of the southern shores of Loch Glencoul where the Lewisian gneisses of the Glencoul Thrust Sheet overlie Cambrian dolomites of the Durness Group. In the extreme east of the site, the Stack of Glencoul provides a famous and comprehensive section through mylonitised Moine psammites thrust along the Moine Thrust Plane over the Lewisian and Cambrian rocks of the Glencoul Thrust Sheet. This classic area enables Lewisian basement from the stable cratonic foreland to be compared and contrasted directly with Lewisian basement involved in the Thrust Belt. The imbricate zone developed beneath the Glencoul Thrust, in this area and elsewhere, has been reinterpreted in terms of a duplex structure - a reinterpretation which has initiated a major reconsideration of ideas concerning the relative time sequence and proposed mechanisms of movement involved in the Moine Thrust Belt. Much of the critical and classical evidence pertinent to an understanding of the Thrust Belt is to be found within this site.

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