Jackson, Ian. Northumberland Rocks — 50 extraordinary rocky places that tell the story of the Northumberland landscape. Newcastle upon Tyne : Northern Heritage, 2021.
The richly illustrated and accessible book series of Northumberland, Cumbria and Durham Rocks are available to purchase from Northern Heritage.
Theme: Climate and landscape change
Echo Crags is northwest of Byrness on the A68 road to Scotland. You can park at Byrness village
On a remote hillside tucked away in the northwest of the county is a dramatic, weathered and worn sandstone escarpment with expansive views over north Northumberland’s hills and valleys.
These rocks are part of the Fell Sandstone. They form crags and escarpments in a big arc around the Cheviot hills and across Northumberland. 335 million years ago, during early Carboniferous times, they were sand and pebbles in a meandering and braided river system flowing across a broad plain. The way the rocks look now, their shape and texture as pock-marked crags, is mostly the result of weathering during and after the last glaciation of northern Britain. As well as the natural rocks outcrops, with their characteristic holes and hollows, there is a small quarry where you can see sedimentary structures that show evidence of the fluvial origin of the sandstone.
The rock outcrops are notable for their rich upland lichen assemblage, including several species that are common in the Scottish highlands but very rarely found south of the border. The most important of these are Alectoria sarmentosa, also known from the Kielder Stone, and Platismatia norvegica at its only confirmed site in England. The Alectoria is one of the species that could be a relict of native pine forest, of which a fragment in neighbouring North Tynedale is a possible survival. The crags are set among bilberry and heather.