Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 May 2009
In 1907 there appeared a memoir by F. W. Harmer, in which he suggested that a number of gorges—those at Malton and Ironbridge among them—might have originated as spillways consequent upon the blocking of the natural line of drainage by glaciers. A few years previously, Professor Kendall (1902) had interpreted some abandoned valleys in Yorkshire on the same hypothesis; a further exposition was given by Kendall and Wroot in 1924. In the present paper we propose a more fundamental origin for these channels.