Moine Thrust Belt

The Moine Thrust Belt is a roughly 190 kilometer long band of thrust faults across the Scottish Highlands, running from Loch Eriboll on the north coast southwest to the Sleat peninsula on the Isle of Skye, and marking a dramatic topographic line between rugged mountains to the west and rolling metamorphic hill country to the east. It formed during the Scandian phase of the Caledonian orogeny, when the ancient continents of Laurentia and Baltica collided, with movement along its faults dated to around 430 million years ago by radiometric dating of associated intrusive rock. Detailed mapping of the belt by Ben Peach and John Horne in 1883 and 1884 proved that its rock contacts were the product of large scale horizontal thrusting rather than ordinary metamorphism, one of the founding demonstrations of thrust tectonics in the history of geology, and in 2022 the International Union of Geological Sciences recognized the belt as a geological heritage site.