Glen Roy

In the 19th century, the Parallel Roads attracted the attention of many early geologists, including the Reverend William Buckland, Charles Lyell, James Nicol, Charles Babbage, James Geikie, and Joseph Prestwich. This interest ensured that the Parallel Roads featured prominently in the development of geological science. Charles Darwin visited the glen in June 1838 and, drawing on his recent findings in South America during the Beagle expedition concluded that the shorelines were raised beaches of marine origin. His paper on the subject was published in 1839 in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society. This was contradicted in 1840 by Louis Agassiz's Glacial theory which postulated…

The Parallel Roads of Glen Roy, Scottish Highlands, represent a series of ice-dammed proglacial lake shorelines produced during the cold climate of the Younger Dryas (GS1). It has been demonstrated by Dawson, Hampton, Harrison, Greengrass and Fretwell (2002) that each lake shoreline exhibits evidence of glacio-isostatic tilting associated with the decay of the last (Late Devensian) ice sheet. The directions of tilting of the three shorelines (in the quadrant between north and east), are at variance with published glacio-isostatic uplift isobases based on marine shoreline data that suggest a pattern of decreased uplift towards the northwest. The gradient of shoreline tilting (between 0.11…