How many extinct volcanoes are in Britain?
Volcanoes don’t exist in Great Britain Britain has a very lively volcanic history. Its volcanic period mainly extended from the Late Jurassic into the Early Cretaceous, peaking in the Aptian stage, about 113-119 million years ago. The landscape of Britain is dotted with long extinct volcanoes. The Scottish capital Edinburgh is built on an extinct volcano called Arthur’s Seat. The mountains of north Wales are the remains of a huge volcanic plateau and there are volcanic rocks distributed throughout the British Isles. Even some of the Chalk of Southern England is now considered to be volcanic ash deposits. Britain is not likely to become actively volcanic in the near future, as Britain is now far from the continental margins and rifts, locations where volcanoes are common. The tectonics of the region will have to change before lava starts pouring across the landscape again.
There are too many extinct volcanoes to mention in detail. The most recent ones are of Tertiary age (about 60 million years ago) and are located in the west of Scotland and Northern Ireland. Check out the spectacular eroded cores of volcanoes on Skye, Ardnamurchan, Mull, etc. Or the basalt lava flows on Skye, Staffa, and in Antrim (Giant’s Causeway). Older still, the remnants of volcanoes in Central Scotland (e.g. Arthur’s Seat, Edinburgh Castle) date from Devonian times. Probably Britain’s biggest volcano was a collapsed crater (Caldera) in Glencoe, Scotland, which (I think) dates from the Silurian. There are also remnants of volcanic activity in many other places, for examle, the Malvern Hlls and in Shropshire (Pre-Cambrian), in the Peak District (Carboniferous) and in Devon (Devonian & Permian), to mention but a few. I’m not sure about the previous answerer though.
