The Solway Lowlands and Coast

The Solway Lowlands and coast are characterised by a wide variety of glacial and glacifluvial landforms deposited by the British–Irish Ice Sheet during the last glaciation. These landforms display evidence of multiple ice-flow events and readvances of Scottish ice across the Solway Firth Lowlands. They include drumlins, crag-and-tail landforms, ice-contact outwash deposits, eskers and kame terraces. Reworking of terrestrial and submarine glacigenic deposits by waves and tidal currents has provided substantial volumes of sediment, enabling the formation of emerged beaches and estuarine flats (carse) and their modern counterparts of saltmarsh (merse), beaches and dunes. The saltmarshes and tidal sandflats of the inner Solway Firth are amongst the most extensive and well developed in Scotland and owe their development to eastward transport of sediment into the estuary by the dominance of flood tidal currents and a unidirectional wave climate.