Geology of Irongray
The oldest rocks in the area are early Silurian sediments, approximately 480 million years old, found to the east of Shawhead village. These sediments comprise a large sequence of turbidites – layers of sands and muds carried by rivers from distant continents and deposited deep in the ocean. These sediments create the typically rounded hills characteristic of the Southern Uplands.
These rocks were subsequently deformed and fractured under extreme temperatures and pressure before the intrusion of the granite massifs to the south around Criffel and Dalbeattie 410 million years ago.
To the east of the village is a basin over 1km deep of younger rocks of Permien age (290 – 250 million years old) often known as the New Red Sandstone, containing angular stones of the earlier Silurian rocks and deposited as alluvial fans in a desert type environment.
The landforms in the valley have been moulded by a sequence of ice ages which ended 10.000 years ago. During that period, glaciers advanced along the line of the Cairn Valley towards Dumfries to the south-east. As these glaciers retreated, the rocks and sediment they carried were dumped, forming a moraine on the low lying land.
Irongray’s Literary Links.
In The Heart of Midlothian, Sir Walter Scott based the story of his heroine Jeannie Deans on Helen Walker from Irongray. Helen walked barefoot to London to beg a pardon for her sister accused of murdering her infant child. Helen’s tombstone in Irongray was erected by Scott.
The poet Rabbie Burns farmed at Ellisland, some four miles away in Holywood parish. Later in his work as an exciseman, he knew Irongray well. In 1794 he wrote ‘In a solitary stroll which I took today I tried my hand on a few pastoral lines…’ the result of which was the song:
‘Ca the Yowes to the Knowes
Hark the mavis e’ening sang
Sounding Cloudens woods amang
Then at faulding let us gang
My bonnie dearie’
A further literary connection is the existence of a letter dated 20th September 1873, in which Robert Louis Stevenson wrote
“My father and I went for a long walk through a country most beautifully wooded and various under a range of hills. When we got to the foot there was the little Kirk of Irongray among broken fields and woods by the side of the bright rapid river.”
And so the parish of Irongray has a long history of appreciation of beauty, continuing to the present day.