Role of the Midland Valley of Scotland in the Caledonian orogeny

Abstract

ABSTRACTThe Midland Valley of Scotland was an arc–interarc region during most of Ordovician—Devonian time. This arc terrane extends beneath the allochthonous Southern Uplands and probably beneath the southern Highlands. Models of Caledonian plate tectonism which regard the Midland Valley as a fore-arc basin are rejected principally on the grounds that (i) the Ordovician sequence at Girvan, in the very SW of the Midland Valley, was generated in a proximal fore-arc basin to the immediate S of a contemporaneous plutonic–volcanic arc, and (ii) the source for Silurian sediments in the southern part of the Midland Valley could not have been a rising trench-slope-break, but igneous basement and conglomerates with clasts of metamorphic basement, i.e. the southward extension of the Midland Valley.The Midland Valley arc first comprised mainly plutonic rocks, some of which may have been basic but most of which were certainly granitic. Little is known of the ages of volcanic clasts in Silurian conglomerates (this time may have been a period of relative volcanic quiescence), but the Silurian–Devonian sequence is considered to have formed in an interarc basin which, like many other basins of this kind, began as marine (Early Silurian) and ended as fluvial (Devonian). At this final Silurian–Devonian stage, the Midland Valley arc was dominated by effusive rocks which made a substantial contribution to the sediments.In this interpretation, the present Old Red Sandstone volcanic rocks are seen as the final stage of a volcanic arc which occupied the position of the present Midland Valley from at least Llanvirn to Early Devonian time.