The Cockpit Country lies in north-central Jamaica, mostly in the parish of Trelawny, but with portions in St Elizabeth and St James.  It is the type area for the cockpit variety of karst landscapes, where profound relief development has resulted in the sculpting of terrain with alternating conical hills and cockpit depressions.  The extreme ruggedness of the terrain has led to very little human settlement in the region and a high biodiversity.  However, the region is under threat from deforestation and destruction of habitat for numerous species.  The area of the Cockpit Country is roughly 415km2, though many different boundaries have been proposed, including the road network which surrounds the region, as well as the forest reserves boundary which occupies much of the Cockpit Country.  However, these criteria do not consider the nature of the terrain. As such, the boundary is defined by major faults along the north and east, the Central Inlier to the southeast, impure limestones in the west, and alluviated areas in the north and south.  The boundaries may also be determined topographically, with all areas surrounding the Cockpit Country having lower relief development, except the east, where long, deep, fault-controlled glades extending south from Clark's Town separate the Cockpit Country from the degraded karst of the Dry Harbour Mountains in St Ann.

There is much confusion over the actual boundary of the Cockpit Country. Some use the forest reserves boundaries (not shown here). Others use the so-called ring-road around the Cockpit Country built by British soldiers to patrol the region occupied by Maroons (shown above in red). These definitions have no geomorphological basis, and clearly include non-cockpit karst areas, for example, portions of the Elderslie and Nassau Valley study areas, which as a result of the analyses performed in this research, have been proven to be distinctly non-cockpit karst terrain.
The Cockpit Country is largely made up of the very pure White Limestone Group, of which the Troy Formation occupies roughly 87% of the entire region. This very hard crystalline limestone is fractured, which promotes secondary permeability, focusing limestone solution in certain areas in the limestone. Such geological controls are very important in understanding how the unique topography was developed.
 
 


Groundwater/ Surface Profile

One of the controls on the development of cockpit karst topography is the height of the surface above the groundwater level. The higher the surface is above the groundwater level, the more room it has for continued vertical development and deepening of the depressions. Once the surface becomes closer to the groundwater level, as it does immediately outside the Cockpit Country, lateral solutioning becomes more signinficant, and depression widening becomes more pronounced, leading to the development of tower karst landscapes. Within the Cockpit Country, however, there is ample room for continue vertical development, as shown in the diagram above. The mean depth of the Cockpit Country groundwater is roughly 430m below the surface.
Photo Gallery

      
   

Other Cockpit Country Links:
Parris Lyew-Ayee, 2003