An Essay on the Encroachments of the German Ocean Along the Norfolk Coast: With a Design to Arrest Its Further DepredationsHewitt, William
History
An Essay on the Encroachments of the German Ocean Along the Norfolk Coast: With a Design to Arrest Its Further Depredations
Hewitt, William
Norfolk (England) -- Description and travel; North Sea; Tides -- England -- Norfolk
The cliffs form part of an extensive series, extending from Hasborough
Lighthouses to Weybourne, north-west of Cromer, comprising a distance of
about twenty miles, and are supposed continuously to rest upon chalk.
In some places the cliffs are very regularly stratified, presenting at
various parts, layers of red and white sand, but in other places they are
wholly devoid of stratification, exhibiting one continuous mass of till.
This position of the various strata will be found pretty correct:—
Tertiary
Diluvial 1 Brown clay: containing bones of the horse, ox,
&c.
2 Till
Newer Pliocene 3 Crag
4 Fresh water, lacustrine, lignite, &c.
Older Pliocene 5 Blue clay containing bones of
elephants, rhinoceros,
6 Red gravel &c.
Eocene 7 Green sand: with bones of extinct mammalia.
8 Chalk
The entire series of these cliffs bears evidence of great and successive
changes; the strata, in many places, are folded and bent, and
superimposed upon others, which have undergone no dislocation whatever.
On the till, with an even horizontal surface, beds of laminated clay and
sand are seen to repose, succeeded by vertical, bent, and contorted beds,
having a covering of coarse gravel and flints.
Between Bacton and Mundsley, small pits or furrows may be seen at various
distances, from the top of the cliffs filled with fragments of white
chalk; regular strata being superimposed. Many of these furrows are
several feet in width and depth. In the till, to the east of Bacton,
these furrows are again largely developed.
The till and marl, layers of which are met with towards Mundsley,
frequently present grooved surfaces, and at different places appear to
dip into the beach, the grooves left being filled with superimposed sand.
The gravel also takes a like dip.
While on the one hand there are evidences which prove the slow deposition
of some of these strata, on the other there are proofs of great
convulsions and derangement.
As a regular description of the separate strata may not prove
uninteresting, let us inquire into the first—
TILL.
This term is a provincial word, widely used in Scotland for similar
masses of unstratified matter, which contain boulders; and the same term
has been applied by Mr. Lyell to this part of the Norfolk strata.
The till is of a dark blue colour, somewhat resembling that of the London
clay, and has been classed by some writers with that formation, because
of the boulders with which it abounds. Mr. Woodward calls it blue clay.
A positive distinction between this and the regular blue clay, however,
must be made.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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