We thank Briggs et al. (2019) for their Comment on our recent paper (Shillito and Davies, 2019). Our work reported a number of arthropod trackways from the Ordovician Borrowdale Volcanic Group (BVG), demonstrated that the trace fossils were hosted within very fine dacitic tuffs, and, coupling this with trackway morphology, proposed that the tracemakers had been lethally stressed by the presence of volcanic ash.