The Aymestry Limestone of the Main Outcrop

I. Inroduction The main outcrop of the Aymestry Limestone forms a sinuous ridge, doubled between Aymestry and Ludlow, about 1000 feet above O.D. It is 25 miles long and lies within an area measuring 12 miles from north to south and seven miles from east to west, the boundary of which passes through Craven Arms, Ludlow, Aymestry, and Leintwardine. The limestone was named by Murchison in 1839, after the village of Aymestry, in the neighbourhood of which it is well exposed, and since that date no detailed work has been done on it. In 1900 Dame Ethel Shakespeare (then Miss Wood) described the Lower Ludlow shales, and in 1906 Miss Elles and Miss Slate described the beds lying above the limestone in parts of the area here described. The later paper contains an excellent summary of all the work done in the neighbourhood up to 1906. III. Detailed Description of the Aymestry Limestone (a) Lithology Three lithological types are found in the Aymestry Limestone. The most common is a fine-grained, massive or nodular, blue-grey limestone occurring in beds of from one to three feet in thickness, separated by greenish calcareous shales in bands from a half to six inches thick. The fossils in this type of limestone are complete, the valves of the brachiopods being still articulated, and many specimens are still apparently in the position of growth. Fossils are more or less evenly distributed throughout, the rock and there is no sorting, as in the second form of the