I found out about Clashach Cove by accident – but once I read about it, I had to visit.

So we set off for a lovely walk from Hopeman – the weather was beautiful, camera in hand, and on my way to see some great geology – ah, bliss! And I wasn’t disappointed when I saw the caves.

What are we looking at? Basically, we’re looking at the results of movement on a fault (we feel this happening as an earthquake).

On the left hand side we see the footwall of the fault.

On the right hand side we see all different geological features. We see layers of sandstone – but have a look at them more closely, the lower levels are sloping down to the left. Then, part way up the rockface, we see all this changing. There’s a definite line, and now everything above this is sloping up to the left. Even the layers look very different – on the lower levels they are fine smooth layers, but from about half way up they are much coarser and not nearly so fine.

There’s also a couple of caves, the one of the left is quite small but the other one is much longer. And next time, I’ll remember to take some head torches so we can go exploring!