Millstone Grit is the name given to any of a number of coarse-grained sandstones of Carboniferous age which occur in Northern England. The name derives from its use in earlier times as a source of millstones for use principally in watermills. Geologists refer to the whole suite of rocks which encompass both the individual sandstone beds and the intervening mudstones as the Millstone Grit Group. The term Millstone Grit Series was formerly used to refer to the rocks now included within the Millstone Grit Group together with the underlying Edale Shale Group.
The term gritstone describes any sandstone composed of coarse, angular grains though, it is frequently used (with an upper case ‘G’) by British rock climbers specifically to refer to such sandstones within the Peak District, Pennines and neighbouring areas of Northern England.
Read more about Millstone Grit: Geographical Occurrence
Famous quotes containing the words millstone and/or grit:
“It were better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck, and he cast into the sea, than that he should offend one of these little ones.”
—Bible: New Testament Jesus, in Luke, 17:2.
“Politics is, as it were, the gizzard of society, full of grit and gravel, and the two political parties are its two opposite halves,—sometimes split into quarters, it may be, which grind on each other.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)