A variety of rock types on show in one of the lanes off Bridgnorth’s Cartway, connecting the former port area by the river with what was the main town at the top of the cliff.
Below, a short stretch of cobbles exposed in the road. Strictly speaking they are likely to be setts rather than cobbles: quarried and cut into shape rather than being large pebbles rounded by natural action. So they will be granite.
I didn’t examine the stones of the little garden: perhaps a limestone or shale from elsewhere in Shropshire.
The back wall is part of Bridgnorth’s cliff of Permian sandstone. It is rock formed over a quarter of a billion years ago when the earth’s land surfaces had all fused to form one supercontinent, Pangea, and the future Shropshire was somewhere in the middle of a vast sandy desert not far from the tropics. The bedding where one dune overlapped another can be seen in these cliffs – in the picture, most clearly in the rock in bright sunlight on the right.
