Booth is on the southern end of the Windsor-Troy trail, which traverses Cockpit Country (so named because it reminded British soldiers of cock-fighting arenas:- hot, sweaty, bloody affairs). This trail was built by British soldiers in the mid-18th century to control the Maroons. The British strategy was to control access to water sources - the Martha Brae River emerges in Windsor, on the north, and Booth Spring, on the south, is also perennial. The community of Booth was probably established in the post-Emancipation (1836-) period, but dwindled and died in the 1950's as many members either emigrated to England or moved further away from Cockpit Country into the more-accessible valley of Troy. Many overgrown gravestones dating from the mid/late nineteenth century can be found. Booth Spring provides a very nice karst "window" to the Cockpit Country aquifer, where the bottom of a cockpit (or, depending upon your view of the world, the ceiling of the subterranean vadose and phreatic components) is collapsing. The geomorphology of this area is text-book cockpit karst, showing how individual sinkholes grow and coalesce to form large closed depressions with multiple points of infiltrations (uvalas) and large bowl-shaped cockpit depressions. During periods of prolonged, heavy rains, the aquifer rises by as much as 20 meters, flooding the Booth depression. This is one of the few locations we have seen Jamaica's unpigmented, troglobitic freshwater crab,Sesarma verleyi, above-ground.
|
Back to |
Back to |