Gate (rock formation)

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Great Staple Gate
Giants Quoits at Rosenithon
Birch Gate

A gate is in the UK a large, free-standing abgewitterter rock that rises abruptly from the surrounding area. In south-west England , particularly in Dartmoor in Devon and in Bodmin Moor in Cornwall , the term is also used for the hills from which the gates rise. The word "tor" ( Cornish : tor ; Old Welsh : twrr ; Welsh : twr ; Scottish Gaelic : torr ) means hill and is one of the few Celtic loanwords in the English colloquial language of modern times.

Rock formations

Tors can be formed from volcanic rocks , metamorphic rocks, granite, or hard sedimentary rocks such as quartzite and sandstone . They are usually less than five meters high. They can be monolithic, like Haytor, but are usually divided into piles with separate layers.

The dating of Tors in Dartmoor has shown that most are between 100,000 and 200,000 years old. They originated at the beginning of the last ice age . In contrast, the gates in the Scottish Cairngorms , the other classic gates concentration in Great Britain, are dated between 200,000 and 675,000 years ago.

There are also tors in the Peak District and the Pennines , where the host rock consists mostly of sandstone (Millstone Grit).

Rock formations in Germany that correspond to Tors

See also

literature

  • Dartmoor Factsheet: Tor Formation. Dartmoor National Park. 2002. Retrieved December 21, 2011.
  • Yanni Gunnell, David Jarman, Régis Bübers, Marc Calvet, Magali Delmas, Laetitia Leanni, Didier Bourlès, Maurice Arnold, Georges Aumaître, Karim Keddaouche: The granite tors of Dartmoor, Southwest England: rapid and recent emergence revealed by Late Pleistocene cosmogenic apparent exposure ages. In: Quaternary Science Reviews. Vol. 61, 2013. pp. 62-76, doi : 10.1016 / j.quascirev.2012.11.005 .
  • Adrian Hall: New perspectives on a classic landscape of selective linear glacial erosion. In: The history of the Cairngorms: granite, landscape and processes. An informal workshop at the British Geological Survey, Murchison House Edinburgh. Monday 17th November, 2003, ( abstract ).