Lugar, East Ayrshire

Near Lugar, at Bello Mill Cottage on the estate of James Boswell in Auchinleck, William Murdoch was born in 1754.

Murdoch's Cave where he carried out a lot of his experiments on coal gas can still be seen on the riverbank of the Lugar Water.

Close to the village, and cropping out for a length of about 5 kilometres in a NE-SW direction, is the Lugar Sill, an internationally studied geological feature and a Site of Special Scientific Interest.

The thickness of the igneous rock is estimated at 42-49 m. It extends in a general north-easterly direction from Lugar, 2.5 Km beyond the village of Cronberry.

Its composition overall is outer Teschenite units and a thick core of layered Theralite and Picrite including Lugarite, (a coarse-grained rock consisting of euhedral crystals of titanaugite and Kaersutite up to 7cm long with corroded feldspars and ilmenite set in a cloudy greyish base of analcime, nepheline and alteration products}.

The sill represents a nearby magma source differentiating in situ to give sequentially injected layers of slightly different petrochemical composition.