Buildings and building stone: Old Red Sandstone in Callendar

Red Old Red Sandstone, Callendar, Stirlinghshire

Callendar, the "Gateway to the Highlands", sits in the Stirlingshire-Perthshire outcrop belt of the Old Red Sandstone. As a result, many of Callendar's buidlings are built of sandstone, and some of that sandstone is as red as the name implies. However, the image below shows that some of the Old Red Sandstone would be better described as a conglomerate, and around Callendar that would be a conglomerate rich in quartz pebbles (note the white clasts). Another example of the Old Red Sandstone in this collection shows that the Old Red Sandstone need not be red, either.

The Old Red Sandstone is famous among geologists as the European counterpart of the Catskill Delta. Both bodies of sandstone were shed off the mountains that arose in the Devonian when Europe and North America collided in the assembly of the supercontinent Pangaea. The Catskill Delta is the sediment carried by rivers to the west (as things sit today), and the Old Red Sandstone is the sediment carried by rivers to the east. The Old Red Sandstone is famous among historians of geology as the subject of rancorous debate among famous early British geologists like Adam Sedgwick, Roderick Murchison, and Henry Thomas De la Beche as they sorted out British stratigraphy in the early 1800s.

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