QE 262 B3 W5A' BOUGHT WITH THE INCOME FROM THE SAGE ENDOWMENT FUND THE GIFT OF Bcttrg W. Sage 1891 Aamma gffinfe • :*& Cornell University Library QE 262.B3W58 1909 The geology of the country around Basing 3 1924 004 549 881 a Cornell University 9 Library The original of this book is in the Cornell University Library. There are no known copyright restrictions in the United States on the use of the text. http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924004549881 MEMOIES OF THE GEOLOGICAL SUEVEY. ElSTOL^ND AND WALES. EXPLANATION OF SHEET 284. THE GEOLOGY OF THE COUNTRY AROUND BASINGSTOKE. BY H. J. OSBOBNE WHITE, F.G.S. . PUBLISHED BY ORDBE OF THE LORDS COMMISSIONERS OF HIS MAJESTY'S TREASURY. LONDON : PRINTED FOR HIS MAJESTY'S STATIONERY OFFICE, By DARLING & SON, Ltd., 34-40, BACON STREET, E. And to be purchased from E. STANFORD, 12, 13, and 14, Long Aoee, London ; W. & A. K. JOHNSTON, Ltd., 2, St. Andrew Square, Edinburgh ; HODGES, FIGGIS & Co., Grafton Street, Dublin ; From any Agent for the sale of Ordnance Survey Maps ; or through, any Bookseller, from T. FISHER UNWIN, 1, Adelphi Terrace, London, W.O., who is the Sole Wholesale Agent to the Trade outside the County of London. 1909. Price Two Si GEOLOGICAL SURVEY OF ENGLAND AND WALES, AND MUSEUM OF PRACTICAL GEOLOGY. (OFFICE : 28, JBRMYN STHBKT, LONDON, S.W.) LIST OP PUBLICATIONS. The publications include Maps, Memoirs, Museum Catalogues, Guides, Ac. j 59 m P'ete list can be obtained from the Ordnance Survey Office, Southampton, price Sd. The Maps and Memoirs can be obtained from the Ordnance Survey, or from Agents. Museum Catalogues, Gulden, Ac, are sold at the Museum. INDEX MAP OF THE BRITISH ISLES. On the scale of l-25th inch to the mile (1 to 1584000). Price— Coloured, 2s., Uncoloured, Is. QUARTER-INCH MAP OF ENGLAND AND WALES (i-inch to the mile, or 1 to 263140), Sheet. 1 with 2. (ALNWICK, BEEWICE, &c.) .. .. ., ... 3. (CAELISLE and I. OF MAN) .. 4. (NEWCASTLE, STOCKTON, &e. 6 with 6. (LANCASTEB and ISLE OF MAN) Solid. Drift. 8. d. e. d. 8 12. GEIMSBY) , (LOUTH and YARMOUTH) 7. (MANCHESTER, LEEDS, &c.) '.'. \ (FLAMBOBO* HEAD and 6 - 2 2 2 6 2 Sheet. 14. (ABERYSTWYTH, HEREFORD) 16. (CAMBRIDGE, IPSWICH) 18. (BRISTOL, CARDIFF, &e.) 19. (BATH. GUILDFORD, SOUTH- AMPTON) 20 with 24. (LONDON, DOVER, and BRIGHTON) 22. (PLYMOUTH and LYME REGIS) 23. (BOURNEMOUTH to SELSEY BILL) .. .. ... Solid. Drift d, «, d. 2 6 2 " 2 6 2 6 2 6 6 2 8 2 6 2 - ONE-INCH MAP, NEW SERIES (1 inch to the mile, or 1 to 63360) WITH ACCOMPANYING MEMOIES. These are published in either a " Solid " or a ■' Drift " Edition, or in both. The majority of them are a £ °™pamed byExpIanatory Memoirs. New Series Sheets 1 to 73 correspond to the Quarter SheetB of the Old benes Map 91 to 110. Some of these are now colour-printed, and are given in the table below ; the rest are still issued as sheets of the Old Series Map. 34. GUISBROUGH .-. 35 and 44. SCALBY and WHITBY 43. EGTON 53. PICKERING 64. SCARBOROUGH 55. FLAMBQROUGH 62. HARROGATE .. 63. YORK .. .. ^ .. 65. BRLOL1NGTON 71. SELBY 3 73. HORNSEA 110. MACCLESFIELD, OON- GLETON 123. STOKE-UPON-TRENT 125. DERBY and WLRKS- WORTH 126. NEWARK "and "NOT- TINGHAM 141. LOUGHBOROUGH and BURTON - 155. ATHERSTONE and CHARNWOOD.. .. 11 156. LEICESTER .. ..8 187. HUNTINGDON .. .. - 203. BEDFORD .. .. - 230. AMMANFORD .. 231. MERTHYR TYDFLL . . 232. ABERGAVENNY 246. WEST GO WEE .. 247. SWANSEA 248. PONTYPRIDD .. 249. NEWPORT (MoN.) 254. HENLEY-ON-THAMES 261-2. BRIDGEND .. 263. OARDD7F .. -.. 267. HUNGERFOED ' and NEWBURY .. 288. BEADING 282. DEVIZES 283. ANDOVEE 284. BASINGSTOKE .. 295. TAUNTON and BRIDG- WATEE 298. SALISBURY 299. WINCHESTER .. .. 300. NEW ALRESFORD .. Price of Map. Solid. Drift. Memoir. a. d. s. d. s. d. 6 3 1 6 1 6 1 6 _ 10 6 1 6 1 6 9 1 6 1 a e 1 6 4 6 1 6 1 6 4 6 8 3 — 2 6 9 9 1 6 1 6 1 6 1 6 1 3 9 1 6 1 6 — 1 6 1 6 2 6 1 6 1 6 1 6 - 16 3 - 16 2 3 16 2 2 8 1 6 1 1 6 6 2 6 1 3 6 r- 311. and 331. 332. WELLINGTON CHARD 314. RLNGWOOD .. 315. SOUTHAMPTON .. 316.JHAVANT 317. CHICHESTER.. 325. EXETER 326 and 340. SIDMOUTH and LYME REGIS.. 328. DORCHESTEE 329. BOURNEMOUTH .. 330. NEW FOREST (ptB.), L OF WIGHT (pts.).. POETSMOUTH and LOF WIGHT (pt.).. BOGNOE 333. WOETHING and EOTTINGDEAN .. 334. NEWHAVEN and EASTBOUENE 339. NEWTON ABBOT .. 341. WEST FLEET, 342. PORTLAND WEYMOUTH 343. SWAN AGE 346. NEWQUAY .. 348. PLYMOUTH and LIS- KEAED 349. PLYMOUTH and IVY- BRIDGE 360. TORQUAY 351 and 358. LAND'S END DISTRICT .. 352. FALMOUTH and TRURO ' 353. MEVAGISSEY 355. KINGSBRIDGE 356. START POINT 357 and 360. ISLES OF SOH.LY LONDON (4 Sheets), each ISLE OF MAN (Sheets 36, 45, 46, 56 and 57) .. .. II ISLE 6F WIGHT (Special Sheet) — OXFORD (Special Sheet) — and Price of Map. Solid. Drift. Memoir, ,. d. B. d. s. d. — 1 1 1 1 1 12 6 6 6 6 6 9 1 3 1 1 6 1~0 2 — 1 1 6 6 1 1 5 3 1 6 4 7 6 1 6 - 5 3 2 1 1 6 6 6 - 1 6 - _ 1 9 6 9 6 — 1 6 ) — 1 1 1 6 10 6 3 - 1 6 1 6 T 14 11 3 3 2~0 - 2 6 2 6 — 1 1 6 6 7 6 1 6 — 5 3 Si 1 6 — 1 1 « 6 1 U 17 9 12 _ 2 1 6 6 8 6 2 3 MEIOIES OF THE GEOLOGICAL SUfiYEY. ENGLAND AND WALES EXPLANATION OF SHEET 284. THE GEOLOGY OF THE COUNTRY AROUND BASINGSTOKE. BY H. J. OSBOBNE WHITE, P.G.S. PUBLISHED BY ORDER OF THE LORDS COMMISSIONERS OF HIS MAJESTY'S TREASURY, LONDON : PRINTED FOR HIS MAJESTY'S STATIONERY OFFICE, By DARLING & SON, Ltd., 31-40, BACON STREET, B. And to be purchased from E. STANFORD, 12, 13, and 14, Long Acre, London ; W. & A. K. JOHNSTON, Ltd., 2, St. Andrew Square, Edinburgh ; HODGES, FIGGIS & Co., Grafton Street, Dublin ; From any Agent for the sale of Ordnance Survey Maps ; or through any Bookseller, from T. FISHER UNWIN, 1, Adelphi Terrace, London, W.C., who is the Sole Wholesale Agent to the Trade outside the County of London. 1909. Price Two Shillings. Ill PREFACE. The area described in this Memoir was originally surveyed on the Old Series one-inch map, Sheets 8 and 12, by W. T. Aveline, H. W. Bristow, F. Drew and T. R. Polwhele, and the geological information was published in 1860 and 1868. It was re-surveyed on the six-inch scale by C. E. Hawkins who is responsible for the Cretaceous area, and by the late J. H. Blake and F. J. Bennett who surveyed the Eocene beds and the superficial deposits. The New Series one-inch Map (Sheet 284) based on this re-survey, was first published in 1897 in the hand-coloured form and in 1905 in the colour-printed form. The geology of the Basingstoke district was briefly described by H. W. Bristow and W. Whitaker in their Memoir on "The Geology of parts of Berkshire and Hampshire" (1862), and, later, by W. Whitaker in his " Geology of the London Basin" (1872). These early memoirs, so far as they relate to the district under notice, are concerned chiefly with the Eocene strata, and afford but little information in regard to the Upper Cretaceous rocks which form the greater part of the area. Some information as to the local Cretaceous rocks has since been published by A. J. Jukes-Browne in his general Memoir on " The Cretaceous Rocks of Britain " (1900-04), but no explanation of the Sheet has hitherto appeared. Since the re-survey was finished much additional information has been obtained especially with reference to the Chalk-zones and the superficial deposits of this and adjacent areas. Mr. H. J. Osborne White is thoroughly familiar with these recent developments, to which he has himself largely contributed, and we are therefore to be congratulated on having been able to secure his services. Much of the information on the Cretaceous rocks and other subjects is new and is the direct result of his own observations. In preparing this Explanation Mr. Osborne White has been aided by the six-inch field maps of Messrs. Hawkins, Blake and Bennett which were placed in his hands. He desires also to acknowledge assistance received from Messrs. Llewellyn Treacher, H. W. Monckton, A. S. Kennard, and H. L. Hawkins, and from Dr. F. P. Joscelyne of Kingsclere. J. J. H. TEALL, Director. Geological Survey Office, 28, Jermyn Street, London, 22nd May, 1909. (12761—17.) Wt. 32624— 49. 500. 11/09. D & S, IV CONTENTS. PAGE. Preface by the Director ™- Chapter I Introduction 1 „ II. Selbornian Beds 6 „ III. Chalk, Lower and Middle 12 „ IV. „ Upper 20 „ V. „ Upper (Continued) 30 „ VI. Reading Beds 42 „ VII. London Clay 50 „ VIII. Lower Bagshot Beds 60 „ IX. Bracklesham Beds ... .,, < 67 „ X. Upper Bagshot Beds 73 „ XI. Tectonic Structure, Drainage Features 76 „ XII. Clay-with-Flints 83 „ XIII. Plateau Gravel 86 „ XIV- Valley Gravel, Brickearth 92 „ XV. Alluvium 97 „ XVI. Economic Geology 99 Appendix. Foup. Well Sections 108 Index Ill ILLUSTRATIONS. PAGE. Fig. 1. Yellow nodular bed in the Coranguinum Zone, near Broadmere 27 2. Section through Well and Horsedown Common, near Crondall... 36 3. Section of the Reading Beds at Upper Nately 47 4. Junction of London Clay and Reading Beds at Sherborne Brick- yard, Sherborne St. John ... ... ... 52 5. Junction of London Clay and Reading Beds at Chineham ... 53 6. Lower Bagshot Beds, Ramsdell Brickworks ... 62 7. Junction of Lower Bagshot and Bracklesham Beds, Little London ... ... ... ... 04 8. Borings in the Bracklesham Beds, Hazeley ... 69 9. Shapley Heath Cutting. Section on the south side 71 10. Sketch-map of the Basingstoke District, showing the approximate positions of the Axial Lines of the Principal Flexures ... ... 77 11. Diagrammatic View from Beacon Hill, near Crondall, looking south-west 78 12. Diagrammatic View of the Vale of Kingsclere, from a point near Plantation Farm on the eastern Chalk Escarpment, looking west 81 13. Plateau Gravel, Hartford Bridge Flats 89 14. Section from Bentley to Isington 94 J2761 A 2 THE GEOLOGY OF THE COUNTRY AROUND BASINGSTOKE. CHAPTER I. INTRODUCTION. Area. — With the exception of a small triangular area, of less than one square mile, belonging to the parish of Farnham, in Surrey, the tract of country represented on Sheet 284 of the Geological Survey Map lies within the limits of Hampshire, and comprises a little more than 215 square miles of ground situated in the north-eastern part of that county. The market town and railway junction of Basingstoke lie in the midst of the district, which extends to Kingsclere and Ashe on the west, and includes the small town of Odiham, the village of Crondall, the wide-spread new settlement of Fleet, and the heathland of Hart- ford Bridge Flats, towards the east. At or near the northern boundary are Pamber Forest, Tadley, and Heckfield, while the upland villages of Woodmancott and Lasham, together with Froyle and Bentley in the Wey Valley, and part of Alice Holt Forest, He just within the district on the south. The greater part of this country is devoted to agricultural uses, and is but thinly populated. Physical Features. — Considered physiographicallv, the district is seen to be divided into three parts, whose well-marked natural limits, coinciding as they do with the boundaries of geological formations, are shown with great distinctness on the maps of the Geological Survey. These divisions are : ( 1 ) the roughly triangular tract of undulating Chalk downs, occupying most of the southern and western parts of the district ; (2) the small and relatively low- lying area, on the Gault and Upper Greensand in the Wey Valley, on the south-east ; and (3) the broad expanse of Eocene sana and clay country, known as the Hampshire Woodlands, on the north and east. In reviewing their salient features, it will be convenient to notice their streams separately. 1. The topography of the Chalk country is rather complicated, and its rationale is not apparent on a first glance at Sheet 284. The general impression gained from a brief inspection of the con- tour lines is that of a broadly-undulating upland, with prevailing slopes to the north and north-east, and rather bluntly incised by numerous branching combes. On closer examination, however, it appears that this Chalk area includes portions of two overlapping 2 INTRODUCTION. hill-ranges, having a roughly east-and-west trend ; one range ex- tending completely across the southern part of the Basingstoke district, from Clare Park, near Farnham, on the east, to Popham Beacons on the west ; the other, farther north, possessing rather strong relief about Hannington and Upper Wootton, but dying out eastward in the neighbourhood of Basingstoke. The northern range, usually termed the Sydmonton Hills, has an altitude of 750 to 760 feet above Ordnance Datum, and a width of five miles, where it enters the district by King John's Hill, and declines eastward to about 350 feet at its tapered termination near Basing. Its lateral slope towards the uneven country occupied by the Eocene strata, on the north, is generally steeper than that directed towards the wide depression of Church Oakley and Basing- stoke, which forms the southern limit of this portion of the range ; the contrast being most marked at the western edge of the district, where the northern slope is embayed by the scarp-bordered hollow of the Vale of Kingsclere. The ground is mostly under cultivation, but there are small tracts of pasture and woodland on the steeper parts of the northern slope, and on the sides of the dry combes on the southern face of the range. A line of hamlets follows the summit, from Hannington eastward to the Roman Fort at Wood- garston ; and the villages of Wootton St. Lawrence and Worting lie on the lower part of the southern slope. On the south side of the Church Oakley vale, mentioned above, the ground rises, at first gently and then more quickly, to the summit-line of the second hill-range, which supports the villages of Popham, Farleigh Wallop, and Herriard. This southern range, which forms part of the Alton Hills, and may be distinguished as the Herriard range or upland, is a continuation of the North Downs of Kent and Surrey. Its blunt crest, while having a general east-and- west trend, follows a markedly sinuous line, and varies considerably in altitude. Barely attaining 600 feet near Popham, on the west, it rises to 684 feet near Farleigh Wallop, but falls below 600 feet about Southrope, and again in the gap at the " Golden Pot," on the- Odiham-Alton road. The highest point, 740 feet, is situated about one mile to the east of that gap, and beyond this point the summit falls away, with some undulation, to Clare Park, where its height is little more than 400 feet. Here the Chalk country becomes greatly reduced in width, and occupies a mere strip of combe-indented ground, overlooked by the hills of Eocene clay and sand on its northern, side. The northern slope of the Herriard range, though varying in configuration from point to point, has one morphological peculiarity which is fairly persistent, namely, a rather abrupt change in gradient, whereby its upper and steeper part is more, or less distinctly marked off from the lower. An effect of this alteration in the gradient is to give the northern profile a broadly-terraced appearance. South of Winslade and Cliddesden the features of the bluff which ^forms the upper division of the slope somewhat resemble those displayed by terminal escarpments of the Chalk in other parts of the country. The lower division of the slope, generally even in its outlines, is interrupted on the east by the wooded clay-hill of Horsedown Common (see fig. 11, p. 78). INTRODUCTION. 3 The southern slope of the range presents two distinct facies. To the east of the high-road from Odiham to Alton it has the form of an irregular and unimpressive escarpment, bordering the low ground ahout Bentley ; to the west of that road it is merged in the gentle southward inclination of the top of the upland, which here has the character of a well-dissected plateau. On the north, a belt of open arable land, varied by scattered copses and small stretches of pasture, extends athwart the lower slopes, from Steventon to Crondall. Much of the higher ground to the south of this is under timber — the oak thriving well on the thick red clay over the Chalk around Herriard ; and among the beech-hangers and stony fields about the heads of the dry combes there are small tracts of thorny scrub, with scattered trees and sometimes gorse and bracken, where the land retains, or has reverted to, its natural condition. Most of the villages in this part of the Chalk area are situated in the combes. Those on the northern slope are disposed in two approximately east-and-west zones, one of which follows the lower limit of the steeper part of that slope, the other a belt of springs, near the northern boundary of the Chalk country. 2. The leading features of the south-eastern division of the district are more easily summarized. The low ground about Bentley and Froyle is, physiographically, part of the Weald, and belongs to that division of the Wealden area which bears the name of Holmesdale, in Kent. The " Farnham Biver,"or North Branch of the Wey, winding along the bottom of the vale, is overlooked on the south by the oak-grown Gault-plateau of Alice Holt, and is bordered on the other side by a flat terrace of arable and meadow land, beyond which the ground rises gently, through a belt of hop- gardens on the Malmstone, and then more rapidly, across open fields, on the flanks of the Chalk upland which shuts in this area on the north and west. 3. The Woodlands country is one of low relief, lying for the most part between 200 and 350 feet above Ordnance Datum, but rising above 500 feet in a spur of Beacon or Hungry Hill, at the eastern boundary of the district, near Crondall. The lowest ground, about 150 feet O.D., is in the valley of the Loddon, north of Stratfield Turgis. The prevailing slope is to the north, but with a strong eastward element on the west and a westward element on east, which give the topography a convergent character. Streams and watery ditches abound, and the soil, though generally loamy and fertile, is in many places of poor quality by reason of an excess or deficiency of sand. A large proportion of the total area — probably more than one third — is occupied by woods and heaths, which have their chief development on the higher parts of the ground between the principal streams. The cultivated land occurs, to a large extent, in irregular belts between the wooded tops of the low ridges and the strips of water-meadow on the floors of the valleys. Most of the villages and hamlets stand on hills, or on distinctly-rising ground ; very few are situated on the banks of the rivers. 4 INTRODUCTION. Though not unpleasing, the rolling landscapes of the country- near the course of the Loddon, and farther west, are of a somewhat tame and monotonous character, and it is with a sense of relief that one turns from them to the more varied features of the sandy tract around Fleet and Hartford Bridge. Here the limits of the valleys are more plainly marked, the ground between the streams in many places rising rather abruptly into hills and ridges, flat at the top, fretted by little combes on the flanks, and bearing fir plantations or stretches of open heath, where the bleached stones of the drift-gravels show white in the thin, sandy soil. Rivers. — The divide between the Thames and the Solent basins traverses the south-western part of the Basingstoke district^ keeping generally to the high ground. From King John's Hill, on the west, it follows the summit of the Sydmonton Hills to Upper Wootton, whence it proceeds, in a zig-zag, southward course, by Wootton St. Lawrence and Church Oakley, to the crest of the southern range of Chalk downs, near Kempshott Park. From the neighbourhood of Kempshott Park it runs eastward and south- eastward along the ill-defined crest-line, by Farleigh Wallop and Herriard, to Southrope, where it again turns southward, to Burkham, at the southern boundary of the district. On the south-western side of the water-parting the only perennial stream is the Test 3 whose head-springs, in years of normal rainfall, are near Ashe. At long intervals a branch of the Biver Itchen rises near Preston House, south of Axford. For some distance down the opposite side of the parting, also, the Chalk combes are normally waterless, but, as the northern border of the Chalk country is approached, there appear a number of small spring-fed streams, all indirectly tributary to the Thames. The greater part of the Thames drainage is carried off" north- ward, through the Woodlands country, by the River Loddon and its affluents, the Hart, Whitewater, Lyde, and Wey Brook (rising at Sherborne St. John), all of which have sources either at, or a mile or so within, the boundary of the Chalk area, between Crondall and Bamsdell. West of Bamsdell the streams rising at the northern foot of the Sydmonton Downs also run northward, but to the Kennet, which receives another feeder — the Tittlebourne or Foundry Brook — from Baughurst and Pamber Forest. The drainage of the small portion of the Wealden area which lies within the limits of Sheet 284, on the south-east, is collected by the Farnham and Tilford branches of the Biver Wey, and reaches the Thames by a more circuitous route. Folds. — Some of the effects of the differential movements suffered by the local rocks are described in the sequel, but the two broad tectonic features by which the development of the existing topo- graphy has been mainly controlled should be mentioned here. One of these features is the complex, east-and-west anticline which has arched the strata in the southern part of the district, and brought the Chalk and older rocks there exposed within reach of the agents of subaerial degradation ; the other is the parallel and less-obviously complex syncline of the London Basin, in whose hollow the soft Eocene Beds of the northern part of the area have been preserved. Upper Cretaceous. INTRODUCTION. 5 Formations. — The following geological formations occur at the surface in this district, and are distinguished in the colour-printed issue of Sheet 284 : — Recent. A lluvium. Pleistocene. { Valley Gravel and Sand. r,c rr j. ■ a f Plateau Gravel. Of Uncertain Age. j Clay . with . Flints . f Upper Bagshot Beds. I Bracklesham Beds. Eocene. -i Lower Bagshot Beds. | London Clay. L Reading Beds, f Upper Chalk. Middle Chalk. Lower Chalk. Upper Greensand. ) a ,, .Gault. jSelborman. With the probable exception of the Folkestone Beds of the Lower Greensand, which lie near the surface in the bottom of the Wey Valley south of Willey House, the strata below the persistent Selbornian Series have not been reached by any well-boring in the district. Although so strongly developed in the Wealden country, the lower members of the Cretaceous System are but feebly represented' near the line of the River Thames to the east of Richmond, in Surrey. The Lower Greensand, which is doubtfully represented under Richmond, was proved in the boring at Winkfield, in Berkshire, about twenty-two miles north-east of Basingstoke, and probably is continuous throughout the area dealt with in the present memoir. The Wealden Beds doubtless occur in the southern part of this area, but their northward range hereabouts is problematical, as also is the thickness of the older Mesozoic sediments which lie between the Cretaceous and the sunken platform of Paleozoic rocks below. CHAPTER II. SELBORNIAN BEDS. The Selbornian Beds comprise two lithologically distinct sedi- mentary groups : a lower group, made up of the dark-coloured clays and marls known as Gault, and an upper, consisting mainly of light- grey, siliceous and calcareo-siliceous rocks (malmstone and firestone), and bearing the general designation Upper Greensand. The Malmstone beds usually have some measure of relief, and are marked, to the north of the River Wey, ^by an uneven terrace, rising north-eastward, from Froyle to Grover's Farm, and to the south of the river, by the westward-sloping plateau of Binsted. The Gault beds, with more varied topographic expression, are marked by low, flat country at Bentley, by uneven ground with rather strong slopes near Northbrook House, and by a broad, flat-topped ridge in Alice Holt Forest. Although the distinction of Gault from Malmstone is natural, and worthy of recognition on the map, these two groups are not to be regarded as separate and distinct stratigraphic stages ; for, as Mr. Jukes-Browne has pointed out,* the fossils of the Hampshire Malmstone " are substantially those of the Upper Gault " in the typical section at Folkestone, in Kent, and the clays everywhere graduate up into malmstone or sand. In this part of Hampshire the Selbornian Series is poorly exposed. The railway-cuttings are overgrown ; the stone-pits are disused, and the only sections in which the writer has succeeded in obtaining fossils are those afforded by a lately-opened brickyard near Bentley Station, and by a hollow road south-west of Isington Mill. The general descending succession appears, however, to be as follows : — Chloritic Marl (base of the Chalk). "Grey flaggy marl, passing down into grey, calcareous, micaceous malmstone. Grey, white, and fawn-coloured malmstone, in massive beds, partly calcareous, partly purely siliceous, and alternating with thin beds of micaceous sandy limestone, and of roughly-laminated grey marl and soft silt. Soft, siliceous, silty malm, in thin beds, pass- ing down into — "Grey and brown marly clay with many con- cretions of race and phosphatic nodules. | Stiff, dark, blue-grey clay, with similar con- (_ cretions and nodules. ! Coarse, dark-greenish glauconitic sand, with i many phosphatic nodules, and some iron- stone near the top. Light-coloured sand (top of the Lower Greensand). The above estimate of the thickness of the Gault beds exceeds that made by Mr. F. Drew,t who provisionally assigned 100 to 120 feet to this division. The position of the junction of the H. interruptus and S. rostrata Zones, seldom determinable in the small inland exposures, o ft ft t3 Zone of Scliloenbachia rostrata, 100 feet. Zone of Iloplites interruptus, 170 feet. Zone of Douvilleiceras mammillatum, 15 feet. * 'Cretaceous Eocks of Britain' (Mem. Geol. Survey), vol. i., 1900, p. 103. t Note in ' The Geology of the Weald ' (Mem. Geol. Surrey), 1875, p. 149. GAULT. 7 is here very uncertain. The higher zone is known, from obser- vations made by Mr. W. Hill in the neighbourhood of Selborne, to include part, at least, of the silty beds below the Malmstone proper.* The Zone of Pecten asper has not been recognised here, but a thin bed of bright-green sand, which may represent it, comes in between the Malmstone beds and the Chloritic Marl to the south of Altonf ; and fossiliferous sands, undoubtedly on this horizon, appear from beneath the Chalk in the Kingsclere inlier, in the area of Sheet 283 (Andover). Gadlt. The basal beds, or Zone of Douvilleiceras mammillaturn, are exposed at Wrecclesham, less than a mile beyond the eastern limit of the district, and probably occur in the bottom of the Wey Valley south of Willey House, but they are nowhere visible ; and the only observed exposure of the beds in the lower part of the overlying zone was seen in a ditch by the road west of Northbrook House, where about one foot of stiff, grey-blue, non-calcareous clay was shown below the Valley Gravel. The Interruptus Zone seems, however, to have been well exposed during the excavation of the cutting on the London and South Western Railway, along the northern edge of Alice Holt, in 1847, when Dr. W. Curtis collected a number of fossils, some of which are preserved in the Curtis Museum at Alton. In the Curtis Collection at that museum the following specimens, labelled "Gault Clay, Railway cutting in Alice Holt Wood," are included! : — Lamna sp. {teeth) Pleurotomaria sp. Otodus sp. {teeth) Area ? Belemnites minimus Lister Inooeramus concentricus Park Hamites sp. Serpula sp. Hoplites interruptus {Brug.) Pentacrinus sp. Dr. Curtis records the occurence, in the same cutting, of " ostreae," "zoophytes," three objects "of spiral form like'turri- tellaB," " fruit-like bodies," and other curiosities ; and he states that " by far the greater part " of the fossils occurred in " coprolites, 1 ' i.e., phosphatic nodules. § Mr. Drew observed " stiff blue clay with some brown sand in it," in this cutting, at a point " near Bentley Mill "|| At Alice Holt Brickworks, north-east of Lodge Pond, a stiff, dark-grey, micaceous clay, with white and light-brown concretions of race, is dug to a depth of two or three feet below thin stony soil. The clay probably belongs to the Interruptus Zone, but it is much weathered and appears to be unfossiferous. * Jukes-Browne, op. cit. pp. 106, 107. f Jukes-Browne, op. cit. pp. 104, 105. J The list of fossils, from " the railway cutting near Alton," which appears in the Geological Survey Memoir on Sheet 12 (1862, p. 4) includes the same forms, with the exception of Hamites and Pleurotomaria, and with the addition of " A [mnwiiites] lautus," " A. tubereulatus," and "A. mammillaris" — the last-named probably from the eastern end of the cutting. § ' Notes on the Fossils of the Gault from Alice Holt Forest, near Alton,' Proe. Oeol. Assoc, vol. i., 1865, pp. 152, 153.' || Note (on Sheet 8, of the original one-inch map of the Geologioal Survey) incorporated in 'Geology of the Weald' (Mem. Oeol. Survey'), p. 149. . Bentley Millj now called Groveland Mill, is. situated near the " Bull " inn, one mile east of Bentley. 8 UPPER GtREENSANfi. Sir R. Murchison records the occurrence of "Ammonites dentatus' (= Hoplites interruptus Brug.) in the Gault of Alice Holt.* At Bentley Brickworks, a quarter of a mile south-west of Bentley Station, two pits show, together, about 10 feet of light grey-brown silty marl, containing numerous concretions of race, hard phosphatic nodules, and, at the bottom of the lower pit, an irregular band of impure concretionary limestone. When treated with dilute hydrochloric acid, a sample of the marl yielded a bulky residue of brown mud, fine quartz-sand, glauconite in small grains, and some grains of a dark-brown mineral, presumably iron oxide. The phosphatic nodules are of a light-buff colour, often with a pink tinge, on the exterior, but dark-brown to black within. The smaller examples are commonly sub-spherical ; the larger (up to 4 inches in diameter) are usually of irregular form, and not infrequently contain or consist of broken ammonites. Many are perforated or grooved by boring organisms. The fossils obtained here by the writer include : — n. Phlyctisoma ? Nuoulana vibrayeana (d'Orb.) Belemnites minimus Lister Ostrea sp. n. Hoplites splendens (J. Sow.) Terebratula biplicata J. Sovi. n. tuberculatus ? (J.Sow.) Serpula spp. Inoceramus concentricus Park. Pentacrinus. In the above list the forms preceded by the letter (n.) were found in the phosphatic nodules only. Belemnites minimus is fairly abundant. The beds seen in this section probably belong to the upper half of the H. interruptus Zone. Stiff, dark-grey, micaceous clay, containing small spheroidal concretions of red iron-oxide, is exposed beneath the Valley Gravel by the side of the road south of Isington Mill ; and a little grey- blue clay was seen in a ditch east of Hill Farm, north-east of Bentley. These clays are near the top of the Gault, but yielded no fossils. Upper Greensand. The local sections of the Malmstone Beds, though more numerous than those of the Gault, are widely scattered, and as there are no well-marked palseontological horizons in this part of the Selbornian Series, the stratigraphic position of the beds seen in a given exposure can seldom be exactly determined. The general aspect, mineralogical character, and sequence of the several strata comprised in the Malmstone group to the north-east of Bentley were described, more than fifty years ago, by Messrs. J. T. Way and J. M. Paine, f who, in furtherance of their studies of the chemical and agricultural properties of the soils near Farnham, caused two long trenches to be dug across the basset surface of the beds between the Gault and the Chalk, on Dean's Farm, which belonged to Mr. Paine. The buildings of Dean's Farm are a little less than half a mile north of those named Grover's Farm on Sheet 284 of the one-inch Ordnance Map, but the two trenches mentioned (together with * ' Geological Sketch of the North- Western Extremity of Sussex. &c.' Trans. Oeol Soc, ser. 2, vol. ii., pt, 1, 1826, p. 100. f ' On the Silica Strata of the Lower Chalk,' Joum. Hoy. Aqric. Soc, ser 1 vol xiv., 1853, p. 225. * ' >• MALMSTONE. 9 some smaller openings) were dug in the vicinity of the latter homestead, to the north of which the ground hears the scars of old workings. Messrs. Way & Paine state that the strata there dip north-west at 20°, and they estimate the true thickness of the beds between the top of the Gault and the top of the Chloritic Marl at about 100 feet. The lower part of the Malmstone (30 to 40 feet) is described as becoming less and less argillaceous, and as assuming a "rocky appearance on receding from the Grault," though remaining " very soft and friable and crumbling into powder on exposure to the weather." This part proved, on analysis, to contain 25 to 30 per cent, of soluble silica, and no calcium carbonate. The overlying beds were," on the whole, more compact, and contained between 30 and 72 per cent, of soluble silica, but were interstratified with a softer silty " earth," which invariably yielded a much lower percentage of that mineral. One of the excavations — described as the " middle or Hook section " — showed a calcareous bed, about 4 feet thick, in this part of the series. The richest 'silica-bed' had a thickness of 10 feet, and occurred 15 feet below the true firestone. The firestone — a white siliceous rock, " in some cases with, in others without, carbonate of lime " — contained 50 to 60 per cent, of soluble silica, and included one or more impersistent bands of blue limestone. The authors observe that this firestone differs from the firestones of Merstham and the Isle of Wight " in having none of the green grains which are so thickly interspersed in those districts." The highest beds (including the Chloritic Marl) were found to be strongly calcareous, and to contain a relatively small proportion of silica in the soluble form. Messrs. Way and Paine believe that their description of the beds examined by them on Dean's Farm "will generally apply to the district between Farnham and Petersfield, though the strata and their sub-divisions will [be found to] vary considerably in thickness." The Dippenhall-quarry section, described in the Geological Survey Memoir on ' The Gault and Upper Greensand of England,'* lies about half-a-mile north-east of Graver's Farm, and just outside the eastern boundary of the Basingstoke district. In 1897 it showed 29 £ feet of siliceous and calcareo-siliceous malm, in beds ranging from 9 inches to 6^ feet in thickness. The thickest bed — a " massive grey siliceous rock, light in the hand," seen at the base of the section — is described by Mr. W. Hill, in the same volume (p. 359), as a " well-defined sponge-bed . . . consisting chiefly of fine amorphous colloid silica . . . , much globular colloid silica, and sponge-spicules." In the road-banks about one-fourth of a mile south of Cheek's Farm there is shown a small thickness of light-grey, hard malmstone, ironstained in places, and mostly in a rubbly condition. The stone is partly calcareous, partly purely siliceous ; the former * ' Cretaceous Eocks of Britain,' vol. i., 1900, p. 109, 10 UPPER GREENSAND. variety being distinctly micaceous, and containing also small grains and rods (spicules) of glauconite, or some allied greenish mineral, and small grains of clear quartz. At Highcom Farm,* half-a-mile west-south-west of Cheek's Farm, a small quarry shows the following section of beds which appear to be at a rather higher horizon than those just noticed : — Ft. In. " Soil and rubble ... 2 Greyish white, blocky siliceous rook, rather hard, with dogger- like concretionary masses 5 6 A course of rough lumpy rock 1 Soft sandy silt 2 6 Massively-bedded micaceous rather hard whitish-grey rock, with large concretionary masses, almost chert in their centres, seen for 10 21 0"f Some of the lower beds of the Malmstone group are exposed in the hollow road between Bentley and Jenkin Place. Here the banks in places show from 10 to 15 feet of massively-bedded, light- grey, lumpy and hard to friable rock, weathering light-brown. The samples examined were devoid of calcium carbonate, and consisted mainly of dusty and roughly-granular siliceous matter, with fragmentary sponge-spicules and a little white mica. When dry the rock is remarkably light in the hand. There are very small exposures of light-grey siliceous, and hard blue-grey calcareous, flaggy stone, near the boundary of the Lower Chalk, a quarter of a mile north-north-west of Jenkin Place. Sir P. I. Murchison mentions that a specimen of blue compact malm-rock from Bentley contained 34 per cent, of calcareous matter.^ The highest beds seem to have been worked formerly somewhere in the vicinity of this village. According to Messrs. Paine and Way, the rock in contact with the Chloritic Marl, and, in places, for a depth of from 12 to 20 feet below it, is broken up into a rubble, " impregnated with a notable quantity of phosphatic matter," and containing " nodules of a purely-white soft substance," which, both at Farnham and Bentley, frequently assume a " spongoid " f orm. On analysis, the white nodules were found to be composed of : — " Insoluble siliceous matter ... 16-82 Soluble silica Organic matter Phosphoric acid Carbonic acid ... Lime Magnesia Oxide of iron and alumina 12-92 2-29 ■78 22-54 34-68 1-01 6-29 97-33 "§ The upper beds of the Malmstone have been worked for building- stone in quarries (now overgrown) about three furlongs east-south- east of Froyle Church, on the south-east side of the high road from Bentley to Alton. Small excavations at the entrance to the quarries show 12 feet of white and light-grey, slightly-sandy, calcareous malm and limestone, widely-jointed and in regular * Where a dip of 5° N.W. is indicated on the map. t W. Hill, in ' Cretaceous Rocks of Britain,' vol. i., p. 109. j Trans. Geol. Soc, ser. 2, vol. ii., pt. 1, 1826, p. 107. § 'On the Phosphoric Strata of the Chalk Formation,' Jvum. Roy. Agric. Soo„ yol. ix., 1848, pp. 62, 74. ' MALMSTONE. 11 courses, separated by thin tiaggy beds of a softer nature and of a darker grey tint. When treated with mineral acid samples of the soft stone yield a bulky residue of grey mud and fine grains of quartz and glauconite. The beds have a slight apparent dip to the west. Mr. H. W. Bristow* mentions the occurrence of " large Nautili " in the Upper G-reensand at Froyle ; and part of a nautilus, of an asteroid {Pentogonaster ?), and of a crab {Phlyctisoma sp.), labelled " Quarley [? Quarry] Bottom, Froyle," are in the Curtis Museum at Alton. Quarry Bottom is a ravine in the malmstone south-east of Froyle, and adjacent to the quarries noticed above. Dr. H. W. Fittonf and Prof. C. Barrois,^ between them, record upwards of twenty species of fossils from the Upper G-reensand between Froyle and Peters- field, but without giving the exact localities whence they were obtained. It is probable that most of these fossils were got from pits situated to the south of the area dealt with in the present memoir. Between one-third and half-a-mile south-west of Isington Mill the banks of the road up the Malmstone escarpment show a number of small sections of beds which' clearly belong to the S. rostrata Zone, and appear to lie between 30 and 80 feet above the top of the beds mapped as Grault. As far as it could be made out, the descending: section here is as follows : — -*s> 'Feet. 4. Grey to brown-grey, blocky and flaggy, micaceous malmstone, with some harder and darker layers which are more calcareous than the rest of the stone 25 ? 3. Brown-grey compact malmstone, with dark-grey and yellow streaks ; strongly calcareous, and on treatment with acid yields a considerable residue of brown mud 5 Inoceramus concentricus Park. Ostrea sp. (small). 2. Brown and grey-brown, laminated, earthy, micaceous malm, with ferruginous patches. Fossils are abundant in a marly layer, about 6 inches thick, near the top 3 Fish-remains (chips of bone) ; Hamites sp. ; Schloenbachia rostrata (J. Sow.) ; Inoceramus concentricus Park. ; Lucina pisum J. Sow. ; Ostrea sp. (small) ; Pecten (Syncyclonema) orbicularis J. Sow. ; P. (Neithea) quadricostatus J. Sow. ; P. (Neiihea) quinquecostatus J. Sow. Plicatula gurgitis ? Pict. and Roux. 1. Hard, grey, blocky, slightly-calcareous malmstone, seen for ... 6 39 The thicknesses given are merely rough approximations. A small area in the eastern part of the Vale of Kingsclere, south- west of Wolverton, is mapped as Upper Grreensand, but there are no exposures, and it is doubtful whether any rock of Selbornian age occurs at the surface there. In the central and western parts of the Vale the highest beds of the Selbornian consist of greenish-grey, micaceous, glauconitic sand and sandstone, which, at Burghclere, have yielded a fauna characteristic of the Pecten asper Zone.§ * In 'Geology of Parts of Berkshire and Hampshire' (Sheet 12), Mem. Qeol. Survey, 1862, p. 9. „-,,>,.,.., f ' Observations on the strata between the Chalk and the Oxford Oolite, &c, Trans. Qeol. Soc, ser. 2, vol. iv., 1836, pp. 154, 156. > X ' Recherches sur le terrain Cretace superieur de l'Angleterre et de l'lrlande, Mem. Soc. Qeol. dn Nbrd, 1876, p. 43. § A. J. Jukes-Browne, 'The Geqlogy of the Country around Andover ' (Merq, Qeol. Survey), 1908, p. 12. 12 CHAPTER III. CHALK. The Chalk, where exposed at the surface or covered by the superficial deposits alone, occupies a little more than one half of the country represented on Sheet 284. Its maximum thickness here is probably about 750 feet, but there are no complete sections, either at the surface or in wells, and the tectonic conditions which obtain at the escarpment in the south- eastern part of the district are unfavourable for the formation of close estimates. All three divisions of the Chalk — Lower, Middle, and Upper — are represented, and the approximate positions of their boundaries are indicated on the map. Their salient lithological features in this part of the country are : — Upper Chalk. — Typically a pure white limestone, for the most part soft and earthy, but becoming hard and nodular towards the base, which is marked (in the north-western part of the district) by the Chalk Rock. Flints are abundant, except in the highest and lowest beds. Middle Chalk. — A white to greyish-white limestone ; soft to firm in the upper half, hard and nodular in the lower. Melbourn Rock at the base. Flints are scarce and small, and almost confined to the highest beds. Lower Chalk. — Grey and greyish-brown, firm, marly limestones and soft marls ; becoming sandy near the base, which is marked by the Chloritic Marl. Flints absent or very scarce. Of the minor, zonal and sub-zonal, divisions, whose limits are determined by palaeontological evidence, the following are either known or inferred to be present : — Zones. Sub-Zones. fMarsupites testudinarius ... \ "*««!»*» 'Band ' r { Uintacrmus ' Band. Upper J Micraster coranguinum. Chalk ' Micraster cortestudinarium. Ti„i„ n j..,„ „i„ „ S Heteroceras reussianum Holaster planus ... ... -j , , „ , ^ r ( (near base of zone). Middle ( Terebratulina lata. Chalk \ Rhynchonella cuvieri. L c Holaster subglobosus ... { f^^Tof^). Chalk ( Schloenbachia varians. A higher zone, that of Actinocamax quadratus, has been recognised in the Andover and Alresf ord districts to the west and south, and may be represented here by its lowest beds, though its distinctive fauna has not been observed. Portions of the local Chalk, and especially the beds at its base and near its summit, have already received the attention of geologists. Near the middle of the last century the mineralogical and chemical characters of the Chloritic Marl were described in some detail by Messrs. Paine and Way, who also published analyses of samples taken from the overlying beds in or near the south-eastern part of the district. LOWER CHALK. 13 A brief account of the whole formation, considered chiefly in its scenic aspects, was presented in the Geological Survey Memoir on Sheet 12, by Messrs. Bristow and Whitaker, in 1862 ; and, fourteen years later, Professor Bavrois described the lithological and zonal features of the beds exposed near Froyle and in the neighbourhood of Basingstoke and Ashe, in his " Recherches sur le terrain crutace superieur de TAngleterre, &c." Notes of sections and other information collected by Mr. W. Hill, and by Messrs. C. Griffith and It. M. Brydone, in the same parts of the country, are embodied in the general review of the Hampshire Chalk contained in Mr. Jukes-Browne's monograph on the English Upper Cretaceous rocks, which was published between 1900 and 1904 ; while the highest beds along the Eocene boundary have been dealt with more recently by Messrs. LI. Treacher and H. J. O. White. These works receive more particular notice in the sequel. During the preparation of the present memoir some additional information has been obtained by the writer, and almost all of the fossils whose occurrence in the local Chalk is here recorded for the first time (as well as examples of many species already noticed) are either in his possession, or in the collection of Mr. LI. Treacher at Twyford, in Berkshire. Lowee Chalk. This division occurs at the surface in two areas : one on the border of the Weald, near Bentley, on the south-east ; the other in the Vale of Kingsclere, near Wolverton, on the north-west. Its basset surface occupies a belt of sloping ground, from 200 yards, or less, to one mile in width, in the south-eastern tract, and is- charac- terised both there and in the smaller north-western area (where it is confined to the floor of the Vale) by wide, cultivated fields and a scarcity of timber. The Lower Chalk, which includes the beds known as the ' Grey Chalk ' and the ' Chalk Marl ', seems to be about 170 feet thick near Froyle. Its lower division, or Zone of Schloenbachia yarians, &s i&r as can there be seen, consists for the most part of indistinctly-bedded, brownish-grey, marly chalk, which develops a markedly fissile or shaly structure on exposure to the weather. The inferior beds of the zone, however, are distinctly sandy, and the so-called Chlontic Marl, at the base, is a dull greenish-grey marly sand or sandy marl, 3 or 4 feet, or more, in thickness, and containing numerous dark- brown phosphatic nodules. The chalk of the Holaster mbglobosus Zone is firmer, and, on the whole, less argillaceous than that of the Varians' Zone, and occurs in more massive' beds, which vary in tint from pale grey (or white, when dry) to dull, greyish-yellow. In the Vale of Kingsclere there are indications of a hard bed, comparable with the Totternhoe Stone, at or near the base. In the highest part of the Subglobosus Zone there is a considerable development of grey marl and marly chalk, readily distinguishable from the marly beds of the underlying . zone by their paler, greenish cast, and by their finer texture. These clayey beds— known as the Actinocamax pknus, or Belemnite, Marls 12761 ^ 14 LOWER CHALK. — are from 1 to 12 feet thick near Froyle, but are poorly exposed, and have not yielded the characteristic belemnoid. They have no clearly-defined junction with the beds below ; their upper limit, however, is rather sharply marked by the base of the Melbourn Rock. The thickness of the H. subglobosus Zone may be estimated at 70 to 80 feet ; that of the S. varians Zone at about 100 feet. Zone of Schloenbachia varians. Chloritic Marl. — The glauconitic bed at the base of the Chalk had long been known to Hampshire farmers for the fertility of its soil when, in 1848, Messrs. Paine and Way * called attention to its phosphatic character at Farnham, Bentley, and other places on the western borders of the Weald. These authors describe it as a green marl about 3 feet thick, in places " remarkably prolific in organic remains," the fossils often lying in "irregular heaps." They ascertained that the phosphoric acid is present in much larger proportion in the fossils and associated nodules than in the marl itself. With regard to the fossils, Messrs. Paine and Way observe that the sponges are the "most prominent and characteristic . . . beautiful specimens of syphonia pyriformis and other alcyonites " being profusely abundant." One of these sponges (" a branching alcyonite ") was found to contain 29*87 per cent, of phosphoric acid, equal to 61*30 per cent, of bone-earth phosphate. " Besides the sponges of definite form, there are oftentimes associated with them, in the midst of the other fossils, immense quantities of large amorphous, spongoid bodies, somewhat resembling masses of recent sponge, which, though shapeless, possess a general uniformity of structure, so as to be immediately recognised by a practised eye. Externally some of them are much eroded. They are extremely heavy for their size, and are of every dimension, varying in weight from a few ounces to 8 and 10 lbs. each. " There is a peculiarity in this class of fossils, for whilst the general mass of organic remains in the green-marl beds individually agree in their chemical composition, these spongoid bodies differ from them and from each other, at any rate so far as relates to the proportion of phosphate of lime, since it ranges in them from 5 to 50 per cent. The richest ones usually lie in the centre of the bed, and the poorer below. They vary, too, in their own component parts, being richer towards the surface. This fact was suspected, and to prove it, one of the largest, of a medium quality, was divided into sections, which, on being analysed, gave the following results : — Exterior ... j 32-27 phosphate of Hme. ( bl 71 carbonate of lime. Intermediate j l™. P h °fphate. ( o7 - 14 carbonate. Interior ... {ggSSfifr Whence the authors infer that the phosphoric acid "was external in its origin."f •• Another abundant supply of phosphate of lime is derived from lumps of various sizes, utterly shapeless. These are always of a light reddish-brown colour : when first dug they are very soft, and never attain a greater hardness . than that of soft white chalk. Their specific gravity, is small compared with * ' On the Phosphoric Strata of the Chalk Formation,' Journ. Boy. Agric. Soc ser. 1, vol. ix., p. 56. t Op cit., p. 68. VARIANS ZONE. 15 the former nodules. In a few instances, specimens have been found which unite the characteristics of both classes ; • the external portion consisting of the latter."* The authors state that " these lumps are invariably rich " (in phosphate), and they give an analysis of a specimen from Dippen Hall (north-east of G-rover's Farm, and just outside the area of Sheet 28.4) showing 27- 13 per cent, of phosphoric acid. " But," they continue, " there is another description of organic remains which is found in still greater profusion than any of the preceding. They consist of very dark brown lumps of every form and size. Some are microscopically small, others attain the weight of 3 and 4 lbs. each : they are both heavy and hard. It appears that these substances at one period must have existed in a soft plp.stic state, since many of them are agglutinized to the surfaces of the syphonise, corals, shells, teeth, and wood. Some very perfect pectens are covered up, both internally and externally, with these amorphous bodies, which cannot be detached without breaking the shell. "f Messrs. Paine and Way further remark that the Chloritic Marl is less fossiliferous in the parish of Bentley than in the adjoining parish of Farnham, but that the " average composition of the marl, and the character and chemical properties of the fossils are identical. "% They give the following analyses of samples from Bentley, (1) of the marl "with a few fossils broken up with it," and (2) " of the fossils themselves " : — Insoluble siliceous matter Soluble silica Organic matter Phosphoric acid Carbonic acid Lime Magnesia Oxide of iron and alumina 97-84 100-50§ With reference to the foregoing analyses, Mr. Jukes-Browne remarks || : "It is probable that much of the soluble silica and of the iron and alumina is combined in the form of an easily decomposable silicate, such as glauconite." Beyond the doubtful statement that the Chloritic Marl "has been largely worked at Froyle,"T the Geological Survey Memoir on parts of Berkshire and Hampshire, published in 1862, contains no mention of local sections of that bed, and neither Mr C. E. Hawkins, who resurveyed the area of Sheet 284 about 1890, nor Mr. W. Hill, whose notes on the Lower Chalk of the district are incorporated in the second volume of Mr. Jukes-Browne's Memoir on the Upper Cretaceous Eocks, appears to have seen any exposures. The pits which were already "partially filled up" in 1848 have since disappeared, and with ~them their adjacent " heaps of the larger fossils," mentioned by Paine and Way. The grey marly chalk forming the remainder of the S. varians Zone is poorly exposed. Prof. Barrois states** that a grey-blue The Marl, including fossils. The fossils. 39-59 7-12 18-4-2 3-27 4-12 3-04 6-89 33-03 4-52 5-58 9-11 46-50 1-64 traces 13-55 1-96 * Ibid, op. eit., p. 69. t Loo. cit. J Op. cit, p. 73. § Op. ci'., pp. 73, 74. || ' Cretaceous Rocks of Britain * (J/em. Oml. Survey), Vol. iii., 1904., p. 39o. «f P. 13. It appears, from the reference in the context to J. T. Way s analysis, that Worldham is meant. ** ' Recherches sur le terrain Cretace, &c.,' p. 44. 12761 B 2 16 LOWER CHALK. argillaceous marl, splitting rapidly on exposure and containing numerous little brachiopods, seen by him above the Chloritic Marl at Neatham (Sheet 300), was visible also at Lower Froyle, but he does not mention the exact position of the exposure. At the latter village the present writer found only one exposure of beds at about this horizon. This occurs in the low road-bank at the turning to Froyle, south-east of the (" Prince of Wales ") inn, and shows a small surface of grey gritty marl or marly chalk. The insoluble part of this rock consists of fine quartz-silt, with a little glauconite and iron-ore in small grains. The only fossils observed were Lima (Plagio stoma) globosa (J. de C. Sow.) and Ostrea sp. A slightly-sandy, laminated, grey marl, without glauconite, and belonging, apparently, to the lower part of the S. varians Beds, is exposed in the sides of a cart-track on the south-west side of Cheek's Farm. " About a mile north of Bentley, in Lock's Grove plantation, Mr. C. E. Hawkins saw much jointed marly chalk, and in Black Acre Copse, a quarter of a mile north-west of Bentley [western end], rather sandy marly chalk was noticed, but there was no section."* Mr. F. Drew saw a " pit in greyish Chalk Marl " about a quarter of a mile north of Bury Court, Bentley."! A few feet of brownish-grey, flaggy, unfossiliforous marly chalk, probably belonging to the highest beds of the Varians Zone, was formerly to be seen beneath massive grey chalk (still visible) in a quarry just above the 400-feet contour, half a mile north-east of Froyle Church. Messrs. Bristow and Whitaker mention the occurrence of Hippurites in the Lower Chalk at Froyle. :£ Zone of Holaster Subglobosus. A pit half a mile north-east of Froyle Church (and already mentioned) shows about 20 feet of the blocky lower bed^ of this zone. Small vermiform, and larger spheroidal, concretions of iron oxide are common. Fossils are scarce ; those found by the writer comprise Inoceramus latus ? Goldf., Ostrea sp. (small), Lima {Plag- iostoma) globosa (J. de C. Sow), and Kingena lima (Defr.). A yellowish chalk, of uncertain position, but probably at a higher horizon than that just noticed, has been worked in a field-pit rather more than a quarter of a mile north of Grover's Farm. The beds are much disturbed, and broken in places into loose blocks, which are tilted at all angles. This disruption seems to be due to weather- ing, facilitated, perhaps, by the high (northward) dip which is known to obtain in this part of the district. The fossils noted here were Scaphites sp. (fragmentary cast), Inoceramus cripsi? Mant., Ostrea vesicularis Lam., Terebratula biplicata J. Sow., Serpula ampullacea J. de C, Sow , Onchotroclius sp. A large quarry with a lime-kiln, a quarter of a mile north-by- east of the (" Prince of Wales ") inn at Lower Froyle, shows about * Jukes-Browne, ' Cretaceous Rooks of Britain ' (Mem. Geol. Survey) Vol. ii . 1903, p. 60. t W. Whitaker, ' Geology of the London Basin ' (Mem Geol. Sun.'), 1872, p. 20. | ' Geology of Parts of Berkshire and Hampshire ' (Sheet 12), 1S62, p. 18. CDVIEKI ZONE, 17 50 feet of firm to hard, widely-jointed, greyish chalk, probably about the middle of the Subglobosus Zone. The small ferruginous concretions usually present in this zone are conspicuous here. Fossils, however, are scarce, a few casts of Inoceramus (I. latus ? Goldf ., and 1. cripsi ? Mant.), and fragments of Ostrece being the only kinds observed. A chalk more closely jointed, but otherwise similar to that just noticed, is exposed, to a depth of 10 to 12 feet, in a road-side pit a little more than a quarter of a mile north-west of Froyle Church. Here also fossils are rare. An example of Inoceramus — probably an immature /. tenuis Mant. — was noted. A few feet above the top of this pit, in the banks of the adjacent lane, the oncoming of the grey Act. plenus Marls, which form the highest beds of the Subglobosus Zone, can just be discerned. The Plenus Marls are better shown in the banks of the road (Well Lane) running northward from the (" Prince of Wales ") inn at Lower Froyle to Well, at a spot a little below the contour of 500 feet.* The descending succession here is : — Ft. Melbourn Rock: hard, obscurely-nodular white chalk 10? f Light greenish grey and dove-grey marl ... 1£ Act. plenus \ Light grey and white, marly, blocky chalk Marls, j (much obscured, and rubbly) ... about 10 L Grey to brownish-grey firm marl 2 passing down into Greyish blocky chalk, seen for 5 The Marls, though closely examined, yielded only prisms of Ino- ceramus-sheU, and a faint impression of part of a small ammonite. Both at this spot and in the lane north-west of Froyle Church portions of the Marls are traversed by small, closely-set borings (0'5 to 1 mm. diameter), filled with rather paler and softer marl. There is another exposure, also much obscured, in a lane-cutting a quarter of a mile south-west of Isnage Farm, north-east of Lower Froyle. The succession noted there in 1907 was : — Ft. in. Melbourn Bock about 10 Act vlenus f Grey to paIe g reenisn -g rev . roughly -fjr i i laminated marl ... ... ... ... 9 ( Soft greyish-white marly chalk ... seen for 2 The upper bed of marl is notably thinner here than in the exposure in Well Lane : the lower bed is not visible. Middle Chalk. This division of the Chalk, as already stated (p. 12), consists, in the main, of white chalk ; hard, and more or less nodular in the lower part, and firm to soft in the upper. Its thickness in this district appears to be about 200 feet. The hard lower beds, which are probably co-extensive in their vertical range with the fossil-assemblage characteristic of the Zone " of Rhynchonella cuvieri, are about 60 feet thick near Lower Froyle. The distinctive features of the Melbourn Rock, at the base of * In the current (1905) issue of Sheet 234 of the Geological Survey Map, the line marking the outcrop of the Lower Chalk is drawn too high on the escarpment here- abouts. ,•.-..• 18 MIDDLE CHALK. these beds, are here less pronounced than usual; the nodular structure, though occasionally rendered distinct by weathering, is hardly perceptible in fresh hand-specimens, and the regular layers of yellowish nodules, frequently observable m the rock elsewhere, are wanting in the few local exposures which the writer has been able to find. The blocky chalk above the Melbourn Rock is not of uniform hardness ; there are intercalated beds which are merely firm, and these, as far as can be seen, become more numerous, or thicker, upwards. 7 The overlying chalk, referred to the Zone of Terebratulina lata (or T. gracilis var. lata), is, on the whole, rather soft, pure white, and, like the Cuvieri Beds below it, closely-jointed, in its lower parts ; but has a greyish tinge and a more massive structure in the upper parts, where there are some fine seams and partings of soft, obscurely-laminated grey marl. Flints— usually small and ' horned —occur sparingly in the highest beds, and a few layers of hard chalk occur close to the top of the zone. The thickness of the Terebratulina Zone seems to be about 140 to 150 feet. Zone of Rhynchonella cuvieri. Small exposures of hard, indistinctly-nodular Melbourn Rock, and of the beds close above it, occur in the banks of Well Lane, north of Lower Froyle, at altitudes of about 500 to 530 feet O.D. The beds overlying the rock have been worked for lime in pits opened on the west side of the lane, but these excavations are now completely degraded, and much overgrown. Where shown in the banks of the lane the Cuvieri Beds are in a rubbly condition. Inoceramus mytiloides Mant. is fairly common, but Rhynchonella cuvieri d'Orb. is scarce, and no other fossils were noticed. The hard lumpy beds with /. mytiloides are overlain by a blocky firm chalk, poorly exposed on the east side of the lane. Prof. Barrois records the occurrence of " Echinoconus subrotundus " (= Conulus subrotundus Mant.), in white chalk, at about this horizon, north of Lower Froyle.* In the hollow lane south-west of Isnage Farm, Melbourn rock, of a more nodular character, can be seen passing up into inter- bedded hard and firm white chalk, with many fragments of Inoceramus mytiloides Mant. About 30 feet of the Cuvieri Beds are accounted for in the small, bush-grown sections along the banks of this lane. There is a small overgrown pit, showing a little rubble of Melbourn Rock, three furlongs north-north-east of Bury Court, and another, where Rhynchonella cuvieri and Inoceramus mytiloides occur in the talus-blocks, two-thirds of a mile north-north-eastf of the same house. Zone of Terebratulina lata. In the south-eastern part of the district the only fairly clear section of beds in this zone is provided by a pitf situated 200 * ' Reoherohes sur le terrain Cr^taoe, &o.,' p. 45. | This appears to be the pit located as "two-thirds of a mile N.N.W. of Bury Court." in ' Cretaceous Ro=ks of Britain,' vol. ii., 1903, p. 390. % Mentioned in ' Cretaceous Rooks of Britain,' vol. ii., p. 390. TEKEBRATULINA ZONE. 19 yards to the east of Glade Farm, north of Bentley. This shows about 20 feet of white chalk, soft and flintless, rather coarse and gritty in the lower parts, and containing thin seams of grey marl. There is an apparent northward dip of 10°. Terebratulina lata Eth. is rather common in the lower part of the section. The other fossils collected are Inoceramus (fragments), Ostrea vesicularis Lam., Rhynchonella plicatilis (J. Sow.), R. reedensis Eth., Plocoscyphia convoluta (T. Smith). A little below the 500-feet contour south of Highnam Copse, and on the south side of the road leading from Lower Froyle to the top of the Chalk escarpment, there is com- pletely-degraded pit in beds which probably belong to the highest part of this zone. In some firm, flaggy chalk on the talus remains of Inoceramus, Spondylus spinosus ( j . Sow.), and cylindrical moulds of the tubes made by some boring organism, were noticed. On the escarpment at the eastern end of the Vale of Kingsclere the upper beds of the Terebratulina Zone are partly exposed in the side of an old track (Hollowshot Lane) leading from The Dell to Plantation Farm. A small opening about 350 yards north-west of this farm shows 6 feet of greyish-white flaggy and blocky chalk, containing a few scattered flints in irregular, ' horned ' nodules. Inoceramus brongniarti J. de C. Sow., Ostrea vesicularis Lam., and Plocoscyphia convoluta (T. Smith) were found, but not Terebratulina lata. In chalk at a higher horizon, exposed in a bank of the same lane at a point about 50 yasds south-east of this section, Terebratulina lata Eth. is abundant, but is there associated with a fauna character- istic of the Heteroceras reussianum Beds of the Holaster planus Zone {see below p. 22). 20 CHAPTER IV. CHALK. Upper Chalk. As a glance at the map suffices to show, the area occupied by the Upper division of the Chalk is far greater than that in which the Middle and Lower divisions form the subsoil. Except for the, break made by the Vale of Kingsclere, the Upper Chalk extends m an unbroken sheet from the edge of the escarpment overlooking the Wey Valley to the western boundary of the district. In the case of the lower zones comparatively little information has been obtained, for sections, and even small road-bank exposures, are scarce. . At Kingsclere the Holaster planus Zone has a thickness of about 25 feet. In the quarry* three furlongs south-west of the church (and in the area of Sheet 283) the lowest part of the zone includes or consists of the Chalk Kock — a hard, massive, cream-coloured, slightly-glauconitic limestone, there about 2 feet thick, and contain- ing a 9-inch layer of green-coated nodules at its top. The Kock doubtless extends into the area of Sheet 284 ; Mr. F. J. Bennett noted indications of its presence to the south of The Dell j but near Plantation Farm, at a spot about one-and-a-half miles south-east of the Kingsclere quarry just mentioned, it seems to be replaced by layers of nodular and flaggy chalk,, containing some elements of the Heterocevas reussianum-rSubzone fauna, which is usually confined to the Chalk Rock in places where that hard bed is developed. No signs of the Chalk Rock have been seen at the south-eastern boundary of the Upper Chalk, on the escarpment above Bentley. In the neighbourhood of Kingsclere, the middle and upper parts of the Planus Zone consist of a mass of irregular, interlocking nodules and lumps of hard or firm greyish and yellowish-white chalk, with thin wavy partings and veins of soft mealy chalk and grey marl. Flint nodules occur - partly in rather ill-defined layers — but become conspicuous only towards the top of the zone. The larger nodules usually have thin rinds, and are of bluntly-rounded form ; the smaller commonly have thick, friable, white rinds, and are often sub-spherical and pear-shaped. These lithological characters are probably maintained throughout the district, though there is reason to think that the thickness of the zone increases towards the east.f Ths Zone of Micr aster cortestudinarium is at least 40 feet thick near Kingsclere. Its lowest beds there consist of nodular and lumpy chalk, hardly distinguishable from that of the highest part of the zone below. The bulk of the Cortestudinarium Zone in that neighbourhood, however, is composed of rather soft, white, blocky chalk, containing numerous seams and veins of tabular flint, and * Noticed in Jukes-Browne's ' Geology of the Country around Andover ' (_Mem. Geol. Survey'), 1908, p. 26. t G. W. Young estimates the thickness at about 60 feet at Guildford. Pi-oc. Geol. Assoc, vol. xx., 1908, p. 428. PLANUS AND COETKSTUDINAEIUM ZONES. 21 regular courses of flint-nodules, mostly solid and with thin rinds. No exposure of this zone has been observed outside the Kingsclere Vale, but, to judge from the character of the beds in West Surrey, the nodular structure, which is apparent only a't the base of the zone in the north-western part of the Basingstoke district, is developed at higher horizons also towards the east, and the flint's become less abundant in the same direction. The succeeding Zone of Micraster coranguinum is estimated to be about 200 feet thick. The lowest beds, if exposed, have not been recognized. The middle and upper beds have been extensively quarried, and although most of the excavations are overgrown, those which remain open are sufficiently numerous to give a good idea of the nature of the chalk at these horizons. The chalk is white and soft, and the flints, which occur abundantly in regular courses, usually have rather thick, zoned or banded, rinds of white, grey, and, occasionally, of violet tints. Beds of hard, yellowish, iron-stained chalk occur, but are rare, and those known to the writer are thin and exhibit, individually, marked variation in hardness. Much of the ferruginous'matter which gives these beds their yellow tint has replaced the skeletons of siliceous sponges. Towards the top of the Coranguinum Zone, in the highest 20 or 30 feet, the texture of the chalk becomes appreciably finer, and the flint-nodules, as well as the bands on which they are arranged, become more widely spaced. The chalk of the Marsupites testudinarius Zone is the most purely white and the finest in texture of the whole formation. The flints as a rule are grey, or black with thick grey cortices, and occur both diffusely and in open bands, which are rarely conspicuous in sections, aod are often exceedingly difficult to follow with the eye. Small spheroidal flint-nodules occur rather sporadically throughout this zone, which has a thickness of about 100 feet. In the Unitacrinus Band, which comprises the beds in the lower half of the Marsupites Zone, the jointing of the chalk is usually of a bolder character than in the beds above and below. The Marsu- pites Band is, as usual, divisible into two parts : a lower (30 to 35 feet thick), in which Marsupites testudinarius Schloth. is common, and an upper part (15 to 20 feet thick), in which remains of that crinoid are either wanting or extremely scarce. Solid thin-rinded or rindless flints, of sub-cylindrical and club-shaped forms, are a persistent feature of the highest beds. Zones of Holaster planus and Micraster cortestudinarium. T On the escarpment at the eastern end of the Vale of Kings- clere a group of small exposures of the lowest beds of the Holaster planus Zone occurs in the high bank on the north-east side of Hollowshot Lane, at a point about 300 yards north-west of plantation Farm. The descending succession here indicated is : — Feet. 3. Firm to hard, obscurely-nodular or lumpy, white and yellowish chalk ■ ,~ .;. ... ■•• seen 2 Coscinopora quincuncialis (T*. Smith), Ventriculites ■mam- millaris T. Smith.- 22 UPPliK CHALK. Feet. 2. Soft to firm, irregularly- blooky white chalk about 4 Baculites bohemicus Pritsch and Schloenb, Scaphites geinitzi? (d'Orb.), Inoceramus sp.*, I. brongniarh? J. de C. Sow., Terebratulina lata Eth. (abundant). _ 1. Alternations of friable, coarse, white chalk, and hard, yellowish, flaggy chalk ; the upper surfaces of the hard layers being uneven and mammillated. ... seen Avellana cf. humboldti Muller, Inoceramus sp.| (common), I. brongniarti J. de C. Sow., Ostrea vesicularis Lam., Terebratulina lata Eth., Porosphcera globularis (Phill). In view of the occurrence of Avellana cf. humboldti in bed (1), of Baculites bohemicus and a Scaphites in bed (2), and of the little, nameless, ' Chalk Rock ' Inoceramus in both, it can hardly be doubted that these beds belong to the Subzone of Heteroceras reussianum, and are on the horizon of the Chalk Kock — the prevalence of Terebratulina lata notwithstanding. It is to be regretted that the exposures of these interesting beds are so small. Poor as they are, however, they would doubtless repay a more lengthy examination than the writer was able to give them. The hard chalk in bed (3) is traceable along the upper edge of the north-eastern side of the lane, south-eastward, for about 100 yards, and it crosses the lane at the spot where the boundary of the Upper Chalk is shown to do so on the map.f A few yards to the east of this spot, and at a level about 8 to 10 feet higher, a small degraded pit,§ opened on the north side of the lane, shows the highest beds of the H. planus Zone, and their junction with the Zone of M. cortestudinarium. The unobscured part of the pit-face has (1908) a height of about 6 feet, and shows greyish-white lumpy and nodular chalk, with undulate marly partings and scattered solid and slightly-cavernous flint-nodules. No bedding is apparent, but the distribution of the fossils indicates the existence of a dip with a rather strong eastward element, which brings in the Cortestudinarium Beds at the eastern end of the excavation, and at a level inferior to that at which the Planus Beds are exposed in the rest of the section. About 10 feet of the beds referable to the Zone of H. planus are shown, and from them the writer obtained the fossils indicated in column (I) of the subjoined tabular list. Portions of the Micraster cortestudinarium Beds, for a distance of nearly a foot from the face of the pit, have undergone a kind of weathering, which, while affecting the appearance of the chalk but little, has reduced both the hard nodules or lumps, and their scanty matrix of marly chalk, to a sort of sand, whence the calcite fossils (together with some small, brown, slightly-phosphatic coucretions, such as are usually present in nodular chalks) can be easily removed by sifting. The rock thus weathered exhibits a vesicular * Small form figured by H. Woods, in ' The Mollusca of the Chalk Rock : Part II., Quart. Journ. Geol. Sue., vol. liii., 1897, PI. xxvii., fig. 17. t H. Woods, loo. cit. t The boundary of the Upper Chalk at the eastern end of the Vale has a more sinuous course than that suggested by the broken line on Sheet 284, and its re-entrant angle near Wolverton Rectory is not so acute as is there shown. § Part of this pit is shown in fig. 12, p. 81. PLANUS AND COKTESTUDINAKJUM ZONES. 23 structure, suggesting that the loss of coherence is due to the removal of some readily soluble constituent which expanded (possibly from hydration) before its disappearance. Fossils are abundant in the Cortestudinarium Beds, but the number of species found was not large. The forms recognised are marked in column (2) of the following list Cosoinopora quincuncialis (T. Smith) Plocoscyphia convoluta (T. Smith) ... Spinopora dixoni Lonsd Micraster precursor Howe „ cortestudinarium (Gold/.) Holaster planus Mant. „ placenta Agass. Echinocorys scutatus Leske Cyphosoma sp Cidaris sceptrifera Mant „ hirudo Sorig Bourgueticrinus ellipticus {Miller) ... Asteroidea Serpula cincta Gold/. Bryoeoa, small fragments Terebratula semiglobosa J. Sow. „ off. carnea J. Sow. Rhynchonella reedensis Eth Crania egnabergensis Rets Spondylus spinosus (J. Sow.) Inoceramus sp. Pisces, small teeth A little rubble of a hard nodular chalk, which may belong to the Planus Zone, occurs in a road-bank three furlongs south-east of Plantation Farm. In the south-eastern part of the district no exposures of the Planus and Cortestudinarium Beds could be found. A flint cast of Holaster planus Mant. was observed in the Clay-with-Flints on the spur (Saintbury Hill) south-west of Lower Froyle. Zone of Micraster coranguinum. The sections in this thick zone are widely and irregularly distributed, and in order to facilitate reference to their descrip- tions they will be dealt with in three geographical groups, the Chalk country being, for that purpose, divided into as many areas, of roughly-triangular form. The first or western area lies between the Eocene boundary west of Basing and the line of the London and South Western Railway, from Basing to Cobley Wood (near Popham Beacons). The second or southern area is defined by the London and South Western Railway and the Alton Light Railway, which unite near Basingstoke ; and the third or eastern area, lying between the last-named railway and the eastern boundary of the district, comprises the remainder of the Chalk country with which the present chapter is concerned. The Western Sections. Kingsclere Dell — a quarry giving shelter to a group of old cottages — shows, above a high talus, about 50 feet 1. Zone of Holaster planus. 2. Zone of Micraster cortestudin- arium. — X X — — X X X — X ? X ? X X — X X — — X X X — X — X X X X X X — — X — X X — X X — X 24 UPP-EK CHALk, of white chalk with many thick bands of closely-set flint-nodules, dipping 25° north. The flints have rather thick rinds, and attain a large size. There are a few oblique veins of tabular flint. The chalk probably belongs to the middle part of the Coranguinum Zone. Fossils are not plentiful ; those seen during the short time devoted to the inspection of the face of the quarry weve— Inoceramus (small fragments, and a large example of I. involutus J. de C. Sow.), Qsirea vesicidaris Lam., Micraster coranguinum (Leske) and its var. latior Eowe, Echinocorys (bits), Bourgueticrinus ellipticus (Miller), Plocoscyphia convoluta (T. Smith), Porosphcera globularis (Phill.). A little more than three furlongs east of the Dell (and 150 yards south-east of Yew Tree Farm*) about 35 feet of the highest beds of the Coranguinum Zone, and 10 feet of the overlying Uintacrinus Band, are exposed in a pit which is dug for marling the clayey country to the north. The beds dip rather east of north, at 20°. The lowest chalk seen is soft, with regular courses of solid flints, and contains but few fossils. Above this comes about 10 feet of similar chalk, with seams of tabular flint, succeeded by about the same thickness of softer beds in which the flint-nodules (mostly grey-rinded) are scarcer and more scattered. The highest distinct course of nodular flints, above the tabular layers, marks, approximately, the base of the Marsupites Zone. Among the commoner fossils in the Coranguinum Beds are, Inoceramus cuvieri J. de C. Sow., Micraster coranguinum (Leske), and Conulus albogalerus Leske — the last named occurring mostly in a definite band, in the beds with tabular flint. Half a mile south-south-east of Wolverton Church a large quarry shows about 60 feet of chalk, rather lower in the Coranguinum Zone. Flints are abundant and often of large size. The prevailing dip is to the north-east, at 10°, but the beds are gently flexed, and broken by little faults with a downthrow in the direction of the dip. A vertical belt of crushed and slickensided chalk, exhibiting a sort of rough cleavage, is shown in section on the eastern face of the working. The chief fossils noticed were an ovate Echinocorys scutatus Leske, Micraster coranguinum, Bourgueticrinus ellipticus (Miller), and Porosphcera globularis (Phill.). J There are old workings in flinty chalk on the sides of the combes which unite to the south-east of Ewhurst, but most of them are obscured. An ovate Echinocorys scutatus Leske was noted in a very small field-pit one-third of a mile south-west of Ewhurst Church. In a large quarry in flinty chalk, rather more than a mile south of Ramsdell Church, Mr. LI. Treacher collected — Terebratula aft. carnea J. Sow, Crania egnabergensis Retz., Stomatopora granulata (M, Edw.), Micraster coranguinum, Plinthosella squamosa Zitt., Porosphcera globularis. On the north side of the church at Monk Sherborne a pit shows " 50 feet of strata with a dip of 8° north-east. The lower part is in rather firm chalk with scattered flints, many being small and globular, and there is one conspicuous tabular seam. . . . Near the top is a course of nodular flints, above which the chalk becomes very rubbly, and contains remains of Uintacrinus."^ Among the fossils noted here were Terebratulina striata Dav., Gidaris clavigera Koenig, and Coriutus albogalerus Leske. Half a mile south-west of Sherborne St. John Church, a long quarry by the side of the high road to Basingstoke displays about 50 feet of beds in the upper part of the zone. Nodular flints are numerous, and occur in rather irregular, undulate bands with a prevailing inclination of 5° or 6°, a little east of north. The chalk is broken by several master-joints and traversed by highly-inclined veins of tabular flint. Fossils are plentiful in the lower beds. Those found include : — Inoceramus cuvieri J. de C. Sow., Ostreavesicularis Lam., Membranipora Miptica Reuss, Stomatopora granulata (M. Edw.),' Bourgueticrinus ellipticus (Miller) (pyriform calyx), Cidaris clavigera Koenig, C. hirudd Song., Conulus albogalerus, Cyphosoma sp., Echinocorys scutatus Leske (ovate), Micraster coranguinum, Pentagonaster quinquelobus (Goldf.), Serpula ampullacea J. de C. .S.OW., Ventriculites radiatus Mant. * LI. Treacher and H. J. O. White, ' The Higher Zones of the Upper Chalk in the Western Part of the London Basin,' Proo. Qeol. Assoc, vol. six., 190(5, p. 383. + Treacher and White, op. eit., p. 382. COEANGUIN1TM ZONE. 25 The sections thus far noticed lie within half-a-mile of the Eocene boundary. South-east of Sherborne St. John the pits in a similar situation are in the Marsupites Zone, whose basset surface widens Tvith the decreasing dip of the strata and slope of the ground at the eastern end of the Sydmonton Hills. On the summit of the Sydmonton range there are very few clear sections, but in all the exposures seen by the writer the chalk exhibits the lithological characters of the Coranguinum Zone. Small pits in flinty chalk with few fossils occur at For Down, and on the east side of the road from Hannington to Wolverton, between a quarter and half a mile north-east of Hannington Church. Very small exposures of similar chalk, in a rubbly condition, are to be seen in road-banks at Ibworth and North Oakley. At Woodgarston (near Ibworth) there are two sections on the north side of the Kingsclere-Basingstoke road, to the west and south-west of the earthworks called " Roman Fort." In the lower pit, a little below the 500-feet contour, the chalk contains many bands of rather small flints, and shows a slight south- westward dip- The upper working shows 15 feet of softer chalk in which the flints are larger and less abundant. A band of tabular flint, three inches thick, occurs near the bottom of the section. The fossils found are, for the most part, of the species obtained in the quarry half- a mile south-west of Sherborne St. John Church (see above), but the following additional forms were noted : — Ostrea semiplana? Mant., Spondylus latus (J. Sow.), Onychocella lamarchi (v. Hag.), Vincularia sp., Serpula ilium Goldf., Cidaris sceptrifera, Mant. On the lower part of the southern slope of the Sydmonton Hills the Coranguinum Beds are exposed about Ashe, Deane, Worting, and Wootton St. Lawrence. Where seen they present no feature of particular interest, lithologically ; and fossils, as Prof. Barrois has remarked,* are scarce in this part of the country. Accessible sections occur by the side of the road from Basingstoke to Andover, at points five furlongs south-west of Ashe Church, and seven furlongs north-east of the " Fox " inn at Woodgarston (near Church Oakley) ; also at the junction of roads north of Deane, and in a field-pit a furlong east of Deane Down Farm. The chalk seen in the second of these exposures is probably very near the top of the zone. Conulus albogalerus Leske was observed in the pit near Dean Down Farm. White chalk with numerous layers of flint-nodules is well displayed in the cuttings on the Great Western and London and South Western Railways east of Basingstoke Station. The occurrence of Actinocamax verus Miller, Conulus albogalerus, and Micraster coranguinum are recorded, from the Great Western Railway cutting, by Mr. Jukes-Browne, f on the authority of Messrs. C Griffith and R. M. Brydone. Mr. H. W. Bristow states that "good specimens of spongiform flints may be obtained from the railway-cuttings at Basingstoke." % Southern Sections. — These, as already stated, are situated in that part of the district which lies between the London and Sputh Western (Winchester Branch) Railway and the Basingstoke and Alton Light Railway. A cutting on the latter railway, on the south side of the bridge where that line is crossed by the' high road from Basingstoke to Andover, shows a long section, 10 to 15 feet deep, but much obscured by rain-wash. Flints are abundant, and are disposed in regular layers which have no appreciable dip. Thecidium * ' Rechereb.es sur le terrain Cretace superieur, &c.,' p. 39. t ' Cretaceous Bocks of Britain .' {Mem. Oeol. Survey}, vol. iii., 1904, p. 187. % 'Geology of parts of .Berkshire and Hampshire' {Mem. Qeol. Surrey), 1862, p. 15. 26 UPPER CHALK. wetherelli Morris, Micraster coranguinum, and a few other fossils were noticed near the road-bridge. A rather barren chalk, containing a few pink flints, and belonging to the highest part of the zone, is shown by the roadside north of Down Grange Farm on Basing- stoke Down ; and there are pits in flinty chalk, at lower horizons, to the south of Bull's Bushes Farm ; to the south-west and south-east of Berrydown Copse ; in the fork of the roads at the eastern end of North Waltham, and in a field three furlongs south-west of North Waltham Church. One furlong south-west of Steventon Manor House a pit showing about 15 feet of the upper beds of the Coranguinum Zone yielded — Dimyodon nilssoni (v. Hag.), Proboscina angustata (d'Orb ), Echinocorys scutatus Leske (ovate), Serpula ampullacea J. de C. Sow., Hydractinia sp., Spinopora dixoni Lonsd. Conulus albogalerus and Micraster coranguinum were noted, with a few other fossils, in a deeper pit near milestone " 14 " on the road south of Waltham Trinleys, and Pentacrinus agassizi v. Hag , in soft, sparingly flinty beds, with many pieces of Inoceramus cuvieri, exposed in the higher of two small pits in Hellier's Copse, by the side of the Winchester road north of Popham. This last pit shows a thin, impersistent band of rather hard, lumpy, iron-stained chalk in its upper part. On the north side of the lane connecting the villages of North- Waltham and Dummer, at a point rather more than a quarter of a mile south-west, of the " Sun " inn, there is a section (10 feet) of chalk with numerous solid and cavernous flints, some of which possess roughly-cylindrical and club-shaped outgrowths extending into the over-lying chalk. Here fossils are more plentiful than usual. Micraster coranguinum, and its var. latior Rowe, are fairly common ; Echinocorys scutatus, of ovate and sub-gibbous forms, was noted, and besides these, and other common fossils of the zone, the following can be recorded : — Berenicea gracilis (M. Edw.) var. tenuis Reuss, Gargantua kippocrepis (Groldf.), Proboscina crassa (Roem.) var. alectodes Greg., P. raaliolitorum (d'Orb.), Axogaster sp., Metopaster uncatus Forbes, Pharetrospongia strahani Sollas. In a specimen of the last-named sponge the calcite is replaced by violet flint. An ovate example of Echinocorys scutatus, Spondylus latus (J. Sow.), and several common fossils were got from a field-pit five furlongs west-south-west of Dummer Church. It was noticed that the ^flint-courses there have a slight south-eastward dip. In another field-pit, half a mile west of Kempshott House, Terebratula aff. carnea J. Sow., and Micraster coranguinum were observed ; and in a third, on the 500-feet contour by the fork of the roads one mile north of the same house, the latter fossil, two examples of Lima {Plagiostoma) hoperi Mant, and Heteros- tinia obliqua Benett. In the road-cutting a quarter of a mile north-west of Axf ord the numerous flint-bands have an average dip of between 2° and 3°, a little east of south. The chalk seems poorly fossiliferous, but the surface is in bad condition. Besides the usual chips of Inoceramus and Ostrea the writer saw only a calyx of Bourgueticrinus ellipticus (Miller), approaching the ' nipple ' form characteristic of the Marsupites Zone. A little more than a quarter of a mile north-north-east of Broadmere, a roadside pit, near the 600-feet contour, shows the following section, below thin soil (fig. 1) : — f 3. White chalk, with many irregularly-distributed, M. thick-rinded flints seen 4 corang- \ 2. Yellow, iron-stained, nodular, gritty, chalk, uinum -j partly hard and partly soft 3 to 8 Zone. 1. White chalk, with a continuous bed of flints having thick pink rinds which exhibit an agate-like banding seen 3 CORANGUTNUM ZONE. 27 Fig. 1. — Yellow nodular bed in the Coranguinurn Zone, near Broadmere. (H.J.O.W.). Scale, 1 inch = 1 5 feet. The bedding is slightly undu- late, with a prevailing inclination of 3° to the north. The yellow . __ _. bed (2) is the best example of the l ,','J: ~'( j <«,*"■:» /(J-^-L^J-'l/ rather rare hard bands of the **"■*•**••*"- ' " """*?» Coranguinurn Zone that the writer has noticed in this district. It abounds in fragments of Inoceramus cuvieri, and rusty impressions of sponges, too ill-defined for determination. Broken tests of Micraster coranguinurn, of a rather stout and coarsely-ornamented type, are common. Other fossils seen in this bed were Ostrea vesicularis Li&m., Berenicea poly stoma (JLioem.), Onychocella depressa v. Hag., Bourgueticrinus ellipticus (Miller) (granulate variety), Coscinopora quincuncialis (T. Smith). A shallow road-cutting near the top of White Hill, north of Ellisfield, shows chalk with thick-skinned flints in even layers, dipping very gently northward. Micraster coranguinurn was the only noteworthy fossil observed. The same echinid, a rather gibbous example of Echinocorys scutatus, Serpula plana S. Woodw., and a few other fossils were seen in a quarry at the southern end of Upper Common, south-west of Ellisfield. Here there are signs of a gentle dip to the south. Degraded pits in flinty chalk were seen in the fields to the east of the row of cottages called Bagmore. Near the southern boundary of the Basingstoke district sections are very scarce. So far as the writer could judge from the nature of the flints in the soil, the newest chalk in this part of the area belongs to the Coranguinurn Zone, though the Marsupites Zone is well developed in the Alresford district (Sheet 300) to the south. The southernmost section observed is by the side of the road running south-westward from Bradley Hill, at a point just below the contour of 500 feet, and this is clearly in the (Jorauguinum Chalk. It shows 10 feet of blocky beds, with thin-rinded, horned flints in horizontal layers. The fossils found were Inoceramus cuvieri J. de C. Sow., Pecten (Neithei) quinquecostalus J. Sow., Berenicea sp., Bourgueticrinus ellipticus (Miller), Conulus albogalerus Leske, Echinocorys scutatus Leske (small, ovate), Metopaster uncatus Forbes. The cuttings on the Alton Light Railway, between Cliddesden and Lasham, are somewhat obscured by rain-wash and micro- vegetation, but all appear to be in the Coranguinurn Beds. Those to the south and west of Winslade show many courses of flint-nodules (mostly solid, and frequently of large size), with a gentle northward or north-north-east vard dip. In the cuttings immediately north-west and south-east of Cliddesden Station the flints are less conspicuous. There is a good exposure in the yard at this station, and here the writer found, among others, the following species — Ostrea wegm'inniana d'Orb., Spondylus dutempleanui d'Orb., Pecten (Chlamys) erelosus Defr., and Serpula granulata J. de C. Sow. Eastern Sections. The exposures seen to the east of the Basing- stoke and Alton Light .Railway present few features of interest. Conulus albogalerus, Echinocorys scutatus (ovate), and a few other fossils were seen in a small pit, near the top of the zone, on the north side of the high road from Basingstoke to Hook, south-west of Basing Park ; and the first- named species also in rather lower beds, with a dip of 2° to 3° north, one furlong north-east of the church at Mapledurwell. A slight northward dip is apparent in a soft chalk with few flints a quarter of a mile west- south-west of Greywell Church. Here the chalk (near the top of 28 UPPEE CHALK. the M. coranguinum Zone) contains very few megascopic fossils, remains of Ino- eeramus, Osirea, Cidaris sceptrifera Mant., and Pentacrinus agassisi v. Hag, alone being observed in the course of a fairly close inspection. South of G-revwell still less fossiliferons beds, at about the same horizon are exposed in a long excavation at the cross-roads east of Spring Head In this section the flint bands indicate a dip of 1° to 2° to the souta-west, and a small fault with a down-throw of 6 feet in the opposite direction. The highest beds of the Coranguinum Zone, and their junctim with the UiDtacrinus Band, are well displayed in the northern parts of the great quarry south-west of Odiham Church. The maximum thickness of Coranguinum Beds visible in 1907 was 21 feet, at a point near the south-western end of the south- eastern face of the quarry. Considering the size of the exposure, the fossil yi Id was small Bourgueticrinus-ossicles and Porosphcera globulans are fairly conspicuous on the weathered surfaces : M. coranguinum, Conulus albogalerus, and Ech'Tioeorys scutatus occur, but are generally ill-preserved. From lower beds, with layers. of small flints, seen for a depth of 10 feet at the top of an old field-pit called Cockhatch Dell, one furlong north-east of Pour Lanes End (Long Sutton parish), the following were obtained :— Apsen- desin cretacea (d'Orb.), Be'-enicea papillosa (Reuss.), Entalophora vtrgula (v. Hag.), Probotcina radiolitorum (d'Orb.), Stomatopora granulata (M. Edw.), together with Cidaris hirudo Sorig., Conulus albogalerus Leske, Echinoconjs scutatus Leske (ovate), and several other fossils. A little flinty chalk, of Coranguinum-zone aspect, shows in the road-banks west and north-west of the church at Upton G-rey ; also at and to the east of Tunworth ; at Polecat Corner, and in the rough lane connecting Tunworth and Winslade. A very small exposure of hard white chalk was noticed in the north bank of this lane, at a point about a quarter of a mile north-west of Tun- worth Church. Between Upton Grey and South Warnborough there are small pits, of little interest, north-east of Dean Farm, and south and south-east of Tile Barn Farm — the last of these yielding, among other things, Conulus albogalerus and Porosphcera patelliformis Hinde. Degraded field-pits, in similar chalk, occur to the south and south-west of Weston Patrick. The sections which remain to be noticed are situated on the higher ground, near the Chalk escarpment, in the south-eastern part of the district. At the south-eastern end of Southrope, soft chalk, containing chips of Inoeeramus and Ostrea, was just touched at the bottom of a pit in thick Clay- with-Flints, by the Post Office. A quarry on the east side of the level-crossing west of Lasham Hill shows 25 feet of beds with numerous irregular courses of flints, whose thick rinds well display the agate-like banding so often exhibited by the flint-nodules of the Coranguinum Chalk in North Hants. Flint-meal, scarce in other parts of the district, is fairly plentiful here, but, except for a few sponge-spicules, the samples taken proyed to be destitute of fossils. The chief fossils seen in the chalk were : — Cribrilina sp., Onvchocella depressa (v. Hag.), Stomatopora granulata (M. Edw.), Cidaris serr'/fera Forbes, Micraster coranguinum (Leske), Axogaster f About three-fourths of a mile north-east of Lasham Church an old pit in a field shows 14 feet of beds with three conspicuous courses of large flint-nodules, and many small spheroidal spongeous flints. A little below the middle layer of flints there is a well-marked seam of Ostrea vesicularis Lam. Fragments of Inoeeramus cuoieri J. de C. Sow., occur in sheets parallel with the bedding. Pecten (Chlamys') cretosus Defr., and Bourgueticrinus ellipticus (Miller), were the only other noteworthy fossils observed. Half a mile north-east of Lasham Church, and within sight of the last section, is a large degraded working, also in a field. The higher (north-western) part of the excavation is overgrown, but the lower, though trampled by sheep, gives a fair section, 20 feet deep, of blocky chalk with many flints. A layer of large ragged flints is seen near the top of this section, and, near the bottom, small CORANGUINUM ZONE. 29 sub-spherical flint-nodules are abundant. In the latter position a bed of soft chalk containing many rusty impressions of sponges was noticed. As in the last section, remains of Inoceramus cuvieri and Ostrea vesiculates are very plentiful. Among the other forms noticed were Cidaris perornata Forbes, C. sceptrifera Mant., and Micraster coranguinum. A smaller pit, at the western edge of Lasham Wood, and a quarter of a mile south-east of Lasham Church, shows rather lower beds, containing many small flints, some of which have violet rinds. An example of Lima (Limatula) decussata Goldf ., was found here. Along the summit of the Chalk escarpment, north-east of the shallow gap at the " Golden Pot " inn, old degraded pits in chalk with many flints were seen at points half a mile south of Swaineshill Farm, the same distance south of the inn at Well, and one furlong south-east of Upper Swanthorpe Farm. A few common fossils, e.g., Inoceramus cuvieri? (fragments), Bourgueticrinus ellipticus, and Micraster coranguinum, were found in all, and also in material from the top of a new well half a mile north of Isnage Farm. Terebratulina striata Dav., was noted in the exposure south of Swaineshill Farm. J376J 30" CHAPTER V. CHALK. Upper Chalk — (continued). Zone of Marsupites testudinarius. As implied in the introductory portion of the last chapter, the Zone of Marsupites testudinarius, comprising the two Sub-zones or ' Bands ' of Unitacrinus and Marsupites, is actually tripartite, the upper beds of the latter sub-zone being clearly distinguishable from the lower, not only in the Basingstoke district, but also in many other parts of England. In the area here under consideration the chalk containing remains of M. testudinarius (Schloth.) has a thickness of 30 to 35 feet, and is overlain by about 15 to 20 feet of beds characterized chiefly by the presence of depressed pyramidate and sub-gibbous forms of Echinocorys scutatus Leske, and Actinocamax granulatus (de Blainv.) Though abundant in none of the sections described below, the latter species is so closely confined to this horizon that it may well be taken as a local sub-zonal index, and in the following pages those portions of the Marsupites Band which lie above the chalk yielding remains of Marsupites testudinarius, will be referred to as the ' Grranulatus Beds.' It should be borne in mind that this term, with the meaning here attached to it, can be used with propriety in comparatively few other parts of the country, for the vertical distribution of Actinocamax granulatus varies considerably, even in the south of England. In the Basingstoke area the basset surface of the Marsupites Zone has a form approaching that of the letter Y, with the stem running from Clare Park (near Crondall) to Basing, and the arms extending from near the latter place — the one north-westward, to Kingsclere, the other south-westward, to Popham Beacons. The zone is, almost certainly, continuous along the boundary of the Eocene Beds, but it is trenched by valleys of post-Eocene age at a short distance to the south ; and from large tracts of the Upper-Chalk country represented on Sheet 284 it has been com- pletely eroded. The northern sections, near the Eocene boundary, will first be noticed, approximately in their order from west to east; the southern sections will be followed from east to west. Most of the former and some of the latter have already been briefly described by Mr. LI. Treacher and the present writer.* Northern Sections.— In the summer of 1908 some trial-pits for a well to supply a new house (Dr. F. P. Joscelyne's) were opened in a field north-east of the Dell, at Kingsclere. The surface of the ground here has a gentle northward slope across the edges of Upper Chalk and the Eeading Beds, both of which formations have a strong northward dip in this neighbourhood. * • The Higher Zones of the Upper Chalk in the Western Part of the London Basin,' Proc. Geol, Assoc, vol, xix., 1906, p. 378. MARSUPITES ZONE. 31 In the first and southernmost of the trial pits, 121 paces south of the southern hedge of the road from King^clere to Wolverton, the section was : — Feet, Soil, passing down into fine chalky loam 2 Uintacrinus (^°^ 'white chalk with few thin-rinded flints. T> j < Uintacrinus, Bourgueticrinus ellipticus (Miller), mna - ( Septifer lineatus (J. de C. Sow.) 2 The second pit, 57 paces north of the first, showed only loam and chalk-rubble. When first seen by the writer, the third pit, 68 paces north of the first and 53 from the road-hedge, had already been adopted as the site of the well, dug to a depth of 45 feet, and cased at the top ; but Dr. Joscelyne, the owner of the land, kindly furnished the subjoined measurements of the section, so far as it extended at that time : — Feet. Soil and Wash 3£ [Reading Beds] Sand and Clay 24i [Marsupites Band] Chalk 17 In the excavated chalk (which contained few flints, mostly without cortex) the writer noted : — Pollicipes glaber Roem., Dimyodon nilssoni (v. Hag.), Inoceramus (bits), Ostrea vesicularis Lam. (very common), Kingena lima (Defr.), Echinocorys seutatus Leske (small sub-gibbous and bluntly pyramidate forms), Mier aster coranguinum (Leske). No trace of Marsupites could be found. From chalk about 10 feet below the base of the Reading Beds, Dr. Joscelyne obtained a stout guard of Actinocamax granulatus (de Blainv.). The occurrence of this species and of the sub-gibbous and bluntly pyramidate forms of Echinocorys seutatus, coupled with the absence or great scarcity of Marsupites, warrant the reference of the chalk in the upper part of this well to the Granulatus Beds of the Marsupites Band. The well was subsequently carried 12 feet lower, but the material thence extracted had been disposed of when the writer revisited the spot. About one third of a mile east-south-east of the well-section just described is the Yew Tree Farm quarry, where (as noted on p. 24) the junction of the zones of Marsupites and Coranguinum is exposed. The Uintacrinus Beds there have yielded, among other fossils — Actinocamax rerus Miller, Pecien (Chlamys) cretosus Defr., Bourgueticrinus ellipticus (Miller) (granulate), Hagenovia roslrata (Forbes), Metopaster uncatus (Forbes).* In an old pit, near the boundary of the Reading Beds, 300 yards north-west of Ewhurst Farmf remains of Marsupites testudinarius and pyramidate Echinocorys seutatus are plentiful, Cidaris sceptrifera Mant. and Pentagonaster quinquelobus (Goldf.) being among the associated species ; while in another degraded working, to the south of Skeyer's Wood, Uintacrinus was noticed. Parts of the Uintacrinus Band are exposed also in a small pit 300 yards south- east of Lower Farm (Monk Sherborne), at the southern end of a large over- grown quarry (shown on Sheet 284) west of Monk Sherborne Church, and at the northern end of another quarry 100 yards north of that edifice. The last quarry shows the junction with the Mieraster coranguinum Zone {see p. 24). An example of the nipple-shaped variety of Bourgueticrinus ellipticus (Miller), characteristic of the Marsupites Zone, was found in rather barren beds with few flints, exposed by the roadside a quarter of a mile south of Sherborne St. John Church. * Treacher and White, op. cit.. p. 383. t Treacher and White, op, cit., p. 382. 12761 C 2 32 UPPER CHALK. The lower beds of the Marsupites Band are well shown in a large pit 250 yards west of Poplar Field Farm, and in a small one half a mile south-east of the same place. Detached plates of Marsupites testudinarius are common in both, the associated fossils including the characteristic pyramidate Eelunocorys scutatus, Porosphcera globularis (Phill.), and P. nuciformis Hinde.* Between Chineham (or Chinham) and Basing there are two sections in the Granulatus Beds. One of these occurs in a small field-pit about 200 yards south-east of Lickpit Farm, and close to an old quarry called Oliver's Dellf (marked but not named on the one-inch map). The pit is eight feet deep, and the soil seen above the chalk in its sides contains the green-coated flints of the Reading Beds, which come on a few hundred yards to the north. The chief fossils found here were : — Actinocamax granulatus (de Blainv.) (two examples), Ostrea vesicularis Lam., O. wegmanniana d'Orb., Pecten (Chlamys) cretosus Defr., Rhynchonella reedensis Bth., Echinocorys scutatus Leske (depressed ovate and pyramidate, and sub-gibbous, forms), Micraster coranguinum(Le$ke) (small), Porosphcera globularis (Phill.) (large), P. nuciformis Hinde. The other section of these beds is in an old quarry at (and partly within) the boundary of the Reading Beds, on the east side of the high road from Basingstoke to Reading, south-east of Chineham Farm. The surfaces of chalk are now so much stained and over- shadowed by vegetation that little can be made of them, though the seeming absence of Marsupites, the character of the flints, and the proximity of the Eocene Beds suggest that the chalk belongs to the highest part of the Marsupites Zone. The character of the fauna here is known, however, from an account given by Prof. C. Barrois,t who states that he collected " Belemnitella Merceiji, May. [? Actinocamax granulatus (de Blainv.)], Serpula, Inoceramus, Ostrea hippopodium, Nilss., Plicatula sigillina, Wood. [= Dimyodon nilssoni v. Hag.], Echinocorys gibbus, Lk. [=-E". scutatus Leske (of gibbous or sub-gibbous form)], Micraster cor-anguinum (rare)." The junction of the Chalk with the Reading Beds, visible when Prof. Barrois examined the section, more than 30 years ago, is now obscured by slips. § In the village of Basing the top of an old pitj| at the cross-roads south-east of the church shows 10 feet of chalk in which Marsupites testudinarius is abundant. Among the other fossils noted were Kingena lima (Defr.), Conulus albogolerus Leske, Echinocorys scutatus (pyramidate), Porosphcera patelliformis Hinde. Conulus albogalerus (a small form) is exceptionally abundant, for this horizon. Part of the Marsupites Band is shown also in a pit^f 300 yards north-west of Hatch, and remains of TJintacrinus were found in a degraded pit known as Cobbler's Dell, one third of a mile south of the same place. The quarried sides of the canal-cutting north-east of Mapledurwell display good sections of the upper beds of the Marsupites Band, covered in places by remains of the green ' bottom-bed ' of the Reading Series. The south side of * A list of fossils collected in the pit west of Poplar Field Farm by Messrs. C. Griffith and R. M. Brydone is given in the ' Cretaceous Rocks of Britain ' (Mem. Geol. Survey'), vol. iii., pp. 190-192. t Treacher and White, Proc. Geol. Assoc, vol, xix., 1906, p. 382. % ' Recherohes sur le terrain cretacS superieur de l'Angleterre, &c.\ 1876, p. 38. § In the Geol. Survey Memoir on ' The Cretaceous Rocks of Britain,' vol. iii, 1904. p. 189, this quarry is wrongly identified with that west of Poplar Field Farm. || Treacher and White, op. cit. p. 381, " near Parker's Farm." 1[ Treacher and White, loo, cit., " south side of Hatch Lane," MARSUPITES ZONE. 33 the cutting shows about 30 feet of soft white chalk, containing a few scattered thin-rinded flints, of elongate and globular forms, in the upper 15 feet, and rather more numerous and larger flints, with thick rinds, in the lower. The fossils obtained include Ostrea vesicidaris Lam., Dimyodon nilssoni (v. Hag.), Spondylus lalus (J. Sow.), Kingena lima (Defr.), Rhynclionella resdensis Eth., Thecidium wetherelli Morris, Stomatopora granulata (M. Edw.), Bourgueticrinus ellipticus (Miller), Cidaris sceplrifera Mant., Cyphosoma sp., Echinocorys scutatus (pyramidate), Marsupites testudinarius (Schloth), Pentagonaster parlcinsoni (Forbes), Staurande raster bulbiferus (Forbes) Pharetrospongia strahani Sollas. The above fossils were found in the lower 15 feet of the section, the over- lying beds being poorly fossiliferous and yielding little besides pieces of Inoceramus, Ostrea, and Echinocorys. Remains of Marsupites testudinarius are abundant in the lower beds, the plates frequently occurring in groups, and occasionally attached in imperfect calyces, but they disappear or become very scarce, abruptly, about 10 feet above the base of the section, or approximately five feet below the top of the distinctly-fossiliferous beds. On the north side of the cutting, where the junction with the outlying patches of Reading Beds is shown, the section is much degraded and only the highest beds are seen. Rather-acutely pyramidate shape-variations of Echinocorys scutatus, Kingena lima, and Porosphmra nuciformis (Hinde), were the only note- worthy fossils observed. Continuing eastward, the next section of interest is in a roadside pit" a quarter of a mile south-west of Greywell House. This shows about 25 feet of boldly-jointed soft chalk, with a few thick-rinded flints, scattered and in open bands which show a slight northward dip. The chalk here belongs to the TJintacrinus Band, and the name-fossil, together with many of its common associates, can readily be obtained. Mention may be made of the Bryozoa Berenicea papillosa (Reuss), B. pulystoma (F. A. Roem.), Meliceritites lonsdalei Greg., Membranipora elliptica Reuss ; and of the Spongias Heterostinia obliqua Benett, Plocoscyphia convoluta (T. Smith), Ventriculites cribrosus Phill. Chalk of the same age has been dug on Adams Farm in » small field-pit half a mile east-north-east of Greywell Church ; but the best section of the Uintacrinus Band in this neighbourhood, and, indeed, in the district described in the present memoir, is presented in the quarry south-west of Odiham Church. Here the chalk referable to this sub-zone is exposed for a thickness of fully 50 feet. Of this thickness 43 feet were measured on the north-eastern face — the only part of the quarry now worked — and the remainder estimated, on the south-east face. The junction with the zone of M. corunguinum (fixed by the disappearance of Uintacrinus) is best seen on the south-eastern face, where it is situated about 8 feet above the highest of the most conspicuous of the flint-courses which descend to the floor of the quarry, and 21 feet above the lowest part of the chalk exposed on that face of the working. The beds dip north-north-east, at about 4°. Mr. Jukes-Browne recordsf a list of 21 fossil species collected from the Uinta- crinus Band at Odiham by Messrs. C. Griffith and R. M. Brydone. The list includes most of the common species of the Band and need not be reproduced here. The following additional forms, obtained by Mr. LI. Treacher and Mr. H. L. Hawkins may, however, be mentioned : — Dimyodon nilssoni (v. Hag.), Berenicea papillosa (Reuss), B. papyracea (d'Orb.), Clausa globulosa (d'Orb.), Proboscina radiolitorum (d'Orb.), Stomatopora granulata (M. Edw.), Epiaster gibbus (Lam.), Porosphcera patelliformis Hinde. South-east of Odiham, the outcrop-surface of the Marsupites .Zone, hitherto confined to a narrow belt of country bordering the Eocene Beds, undergoes a considerable expansion, and occupies the greater part of the Upper-Chalk country lying to the east of a line drawn from Odiham to Sheephouse Copse, near the edge of the escarpment, south-east of Long Sutton. Most of the pits within 11 Treacher and White, op. cit. p. 381, "Greywell Hill." t ' Cretaceous Rooks of Britain ' (Mem. Oeol. Survey), vol. iii., 1904, pp. 190-192. 34 UPPER CHALK. this area are in chalk of the Marsupites Band, the underlying beds being exposed on the southern and western borders alone. In the northern part of the combe which trenches the dip-slope of the Chalk between Well and Odiham the Uintacrinus Beds are shown at Wassel s Copse, three furlongs south of Hill Side (Farm), and in a field-pit nearly halt a mile north-west of Newland's Farm. Among the fossils found in the latter pit were, CribriUna dibleyi Brydone, and Parasmilia centralis (Mant.) Eeturning to the boundary of the Eocene Beds, the next section to be noticed is an excellent one of the Marsupites Band, in a quarry* situated one furlong south-south-east of Little Rye Farm. It shows 35 to 40 feet of chalk, and the few irregular bands of rather small flints indicate a northward dip of about 4°- In the lower beds tests of Echinocorys scutatus (Leske) (pyramidate) occur in remarkable profusion (as was noted by Mr. H. W. Bristowf), especially in a definite band, traceable along the eastern face of the pit. Plates of Marsupites testudinarius (Schloth.) are not less conspicuous, their ornamentation becoming more pronounced as they range up the section. As in the canal section near Maple- durwell {see above, p. 32), the upper limit of their occurrence is sharply marked, and lies about 15 feet below the top of the quarry at its southern end. The highest or Granulatus Beds, above the chalk with Marsupites, are poorly exposed on a sloping dirty surface, and yielded only Ostrea vesicularis Lam. (of small size) and frag- ments of Echinocorys. The elongate thin-rinded flints observed at this horizon in other sections occur here also. In the lower beds of this section the commoner fossils of the Marsupites Band are plentiful. Mention may be made of IStauran- deraster ocellatus Sladen (many ossicles), Porospliara pileolas (Lam.), and P. glolularis (Phill.), which last here attains a largar size (21 mm.) than is usual in this part of the country. North-east of Itchell House a large quarry,J marked on Sheet 284 by a loop in the 300-feet contour, gives a good section of the Granulatus Beds. The beds with Marsupites testudinarius just appear above the floor of the pit near the entrance from the road, and are overlain by 17 feet of soft chalk containing few flints, which are mostly small, of elongate form, and possess very thin cortices. Remains of the green, pebbly ' bottom-bed ' of the Reading Series, filling pipes and shallow depressions in the chalk, are seen in many places along the top of the working-faces in the northern parts of the quarry. Among the fossils seen in the Granulatus Beds were : — Spondylus spinotus (J. Sow.), Echinocorys scutatus Leske (depressed pyramidate), Cyphosoma kocnigi (Mant.), Metopaster uncatus (Forbes), Nymphaster marginatus Sladen, Stauranderaster bulbiferus (Forbes). Actinocamax granulatus was doubtfully represented by a tubular cavity, seen in the north-western face of the pit. South-east of Itchell House only two other pits on the Marsupites Band were seen near the boundary of the Eocene Beds. In one of these, half a mile east of Crondall Church § a recent excavation shows 6 feet of soft blocky chalk, in which plates of Marsupites testudinarius and pyramidate tests of Echinocorys scutatus are fairly common. In the other, a very small and degraded working at the southern corner of Clare Park, remains of Marsupites and a large example of Porosphcera nuciformis (Hinde) were found. * Treacher and White Proc. Geol. Assoc, vol. xix., 1906, p. 380, " south of Rye Common." •I- In 'Geology of Parts of Berkshire and Hampshire' (Mem. Geol. Survey-), 1862, p. 18. t Treacher and White, loo. nit., " [in] the park east of Itchell House." § Treacher and White, loo. cit., " south-east of Bjron's Farm." MARStfP-lTES ZONtf. 35 Southern Sections. — Commencing on the east ; there are many exposures of chalk in the Marsupites Zone around the Eocene outliers of Horsedown Common and Well, hut most of them are small, and .will be dismissed with brief notice. Chalk yielding Marsupites testudinarius is exposed three furlongs south-east of Thorn's Farm, in the banks of the hollow lane south of Swanthorpe Farm, and in a pit one furlong north-east of Roke Farm. In the last of these, small cup- shaped flints and ferruginous casts of sponges are not uncommon. Higher beds, sparingly fossiliferous, but yielding Ostrea vesicularis Lam., of small size, and a few examples of the depressed pyramidate and sub-gibbous to sub-ovate forms of Eehinocorys scutatus characteristic of the highest part of the Marsupites Zone, were seen in a pit three furlongs south-west of Thorn's Farm ; in another, close upon the boundary of the Horsedown Eocene outlier, and a little north of Swanthorpe Farm ; and in a third, where the junction with the Reading Beds is shown, by the roadside (opposite Stroud Farm), at the northern end of the Well outlier. In the last section, which was closely examined for indication s of the base of the Actinocamax quadratus Zone, the fossils found were : Lamna appen- diculata Agas. (tooth), Inoceramus (bits), Ostrea vesicularis Lam. (small, common), 0. wegmanniana d'Orb., Terebraiulina striata Dav , Onychocella lamarchi (v. Hag.), Asteroidea, Cyphosoma sp. (radiole), Micraster coranguinum (Leske) (bits), Helicodiadema fragile (Wilts.), Porosplimra nuci/ormis Hinde, P.pileolus (Lam.). This list cqntains nothing suggestive of the zone of Act. quadratus. Exposures of more interest are seen to the south and west of Well. The banks of the road from Well to Long Sutton, and two pits opened in the north side of that road, together present an incom- plete but instructive section of the upper half of the Marsupites Zone. The section is situated on the slope (called White Hill) which forms the eastern side of the combe of Summer's Farm, east of Long Sutton. As there is no appreciable dip along the line of the road, the thickness of the beds exposed is probably nearly equivalent to the difference in the altitudes of the upper and lower ends of the section — that is to say, 70 feet. The descending suc- cession is : — Feet. Marsupites ( Granulatus Beds ... ... seen for 15 Band ( Beds with Marsupites testudinarius about 35 Uintacrinus Band ... ... ... ... about 20 70 The junction of the Marsupites and Uintacrinus Bands could not be exactly located, but probably occurs a foot or two below the floor of the lower pit,* towards the bottom of which remains of Marsupites testudinarius become very scarce, and are associated with Eehinocorys scutatus of the sharply-angulate form usually found in the Uintacrinus Band in North Hampshire. The base of the Granulatus Beds (marked by the disappearance, or virtual disappearance, of remains of Marsupites testudinarius on ascending the section) occurs near the floor of the upper pit,t which shows about 12 feet of these beds, containing the usual thin-rinded flints. Among the fossils collected in this pit are : Actinocamax granulatus (de Blainv.), Ostrea vesicularis Lam. (small form), Onycho- cella lamarchi (v. Hag.), Smittipora obliqua (d'Orb.), Eehinocorys scutatus Leske (depressed ovate and sub-gibbous forms), Poro- sphcera nuciformis Hinde. * This pit is one-third of a mile W.N. W. of the (" Chequers ") inn at Well. + A little less than a quarter of a mile W.N. W. of the inn at WelL 36 UPPER CHALK. Above the level of the top of the upper pit a little higher chalk (2 or 3 feet thick) is indicated in the banks of the road ; but the abundance of green flint-pebbles and glauconitic sand in the soil hereabouts shows that the upper limit of the whole section above, described closely approaches the upper limit of the Chalk formation. To the south of Well a similar succession is recog- nizable in the low banks of Well Lane, connecting that village with Lower Froyle. Here, however, the line of section runs approximately parallel with the dip, and the dip being northward, at a higher angle than the slope of the ground, the several divisions of the Marsupites Zone come to the surface in descending order towards the south, see fig. 2. The junction of the Granulatus Beds with the Reading Beds was found (by excavating) at the turning of the hollow lane (Frog Lane) to Sheephouse Farm, the chalk here yielding a small fauna similar to that found in the junction-section near Stroud Farm, at the northern end of Well (see above, p. 35), and showing a few borings filled with the glauconitic loam and green pebbles of the Reading Beds. Two hundred yards south of this turning, and at a rather higher altitude, similar chalk, also with borings containing the green material of the Reading Beds, and capped by glau- conitic loam, was found beneath brown loam with angular flints in the west bank of Well Lane. South of this point the ground rises more quickly, and at 400 and 450 yards from the turning- above mentioned the chalk in the lane-banks was found to At a distance of 520 yards south of contain plates of Marsupites. MARSUPITES ZONE. 37 the turning, plates and brachial ossicles of Uintacrinus were observed in the banks, but the chalk in which they occurred must be at the base of the Uintacrinus Band, for remains of this crinoid were not forthcoming in an old pit opened a little below the level of the lane at this point, nor in the small exposures of chalk farther south. Just here, too, the gradient of the (northward) dip-slope shows a marked increase, which may well be due to the emergence of the more resistant Coranguinum Beds, see fig. 2. Going westward from Well, a little soft chalk, containing Mar- supites testudinarius, was seen in the roadway east of Long Sutton, but beyond that place the writer failed to obtain any evidence of the Marsupites Zone short of Hackwood Park. Remains of Uintacrinus and of Bourgueticrinus ellipticus occur freely in the rubble on the slopes of an overgrown pit three-quarters of a mile north of Hack- wood House, and in a water-hole at the side of the Winchester road, a quarter of a mile east-north-east of Down Grange Farm. In a shallow pit a few yards east of the railway bridge north of Battle Down Farm Marsupites-iplates, Porosphoira globularis, and fragments of Echinocorys are fairly plentiful, while Uintacrinus, associated with Bourgueticrinus ellipticus, Pentagonaster quinquelobns (Goldf.), and Porosphcera;, occurs sparingly in a little field-pit 300 yards south-west of the " Fox" inn at Woodgarston (near Church Oakley). At Church Oakley Marsupites occurs in the banks at the cross-ways a quarter of a mile south-east of the church, and the same fossil, with Ostrea vesicularis Lam., Spondylus dutempleanus d'Orb., and Echinocorys (bits), were found, also in road-banks, a little below the 400-feet contour at East Oakley. The upper part of the London and South-Western Railway cutting south-east of East Oakley (and above the 400-feet contour) seems to be in the Granulatus Beds, for the chalk exposed in the rough paths which lead down to the rails on either side of the road-bridge yielded an Echinocorys scutalus of depressed form, together with Terebratulina striata Dav., Membranipora francqana (d'Orb.), and Cyphosoma sp., but no remains of Marsupites. To the same beds probably belongs the chalk exposed in a road-bank at the spot marked " 435 [feet O.D.]," three-quarters of a mile east of Oakley Hall, but the only fossils noticed here were Clausa globulosa (d'Orb.), Onychocella sp., Cyphosoma sp., and Helicodiaderna fragile (Wilts.). Farther west, the Marsupites Zone seems to be confined to a belt of country following the line of the London and South-Western Railway (Winchester branch), and extending about one half to three- quarters of a mile on either side of it ; but very few exposures were found in this part of the district. In the grounds of Litchfield Grange, at a point one furlong north-west of the House, a small pit in a copse shows 12 feet of soft chalk with scattered flints, many of which are of sub-spherical form. Remains of Marsupites testudinarius are abundant. Some of the other fossils collected are Meliceritites lonsdalei Greg., Onychocella lamarclci (v. Hag.), Bourgueticrinus ellipticus (Miller) (pyriform calyx), Micraster coranguinum (Leske) (small, carinate). A few brachial ossicles of a crinoid (probably Uintacrinus) were noted in the chalk-rubble of the mounds or tumuli at Popham Beacons, and also in a sunken track 200 yards to the north-west. List of Fossils from the Chalk. The bulk of the fossils from which the subjoined list is compiled were obtained by Mr. LI. Treacher and the writer of this Memoir, and are in their possession. The species or occurrences marked by the letter " B " in the zonal columns are given on the authority of Professor C. Barrois — "Recherches sur le terrain cretace superieur de l'Angleterre et de- 38 CHALK FOSSILS. l'Irlande," 1876, pp. 38, 45 (see above pp. 18, 32); those marked " G " are quoted from Mr. A. J. Jukes-Browne's Memoir on " The Cretaceous Eocks of Britain " (Mem. Geol. Surv.), vol. iii., 1904, pp. 187, 189-192, where they are recorded on the authority of Messrs. C. Griffith and E. M. Brydone (see above pp. 25, 32, 33). The Bryozoa were determined by Mr. LI. Treacher. List of Fossils (Chalk). Lower Chalk. KJ Spongle. Cosoinopora quincuncialis (T. Sm ith). Heterostinia obliqua Benett Plinthosella squamosa Zitt. Plocoscyphia convoluta (T. Smith) Ventriculites cribrosus Phill. mammillaris T. Smith radiatns Mant. Pharetrospongia strahani Sollas ... Porosphsera globularis (Phill.) ... nuciformis Hinde patelliformis Hinde pileolus (Lam.) A NT BOZO A. Axogaster cretacea Lonsd. Onchotrochus sp Parasmilia centralis (Mant.) Spinopora dixoni Lonsd Hydrozoa. Hydractinia sp ECHINODERMATA. Crinoidea. Bourgueticrinus ellipticus (Miller) ■ (granulate) (nipple-shaped) Pentacrinus agassizi v. Hag. Marsupites testudinarius (Schloth.) Uintacrinus sp. .. M KJ Asteroidea. Metopaster uncatus (Forbes) Nymphaster marginatus Sladen ■ obligoplax Sladen ... Middle Chalk. Upper Chalk. N a si ° ° 5 s G a CHALK FOSSILS. 39 Lower Chalk. Middle Chalk. Upp ar Chalk. List of Fossils (Chalk) — continued. CO d c« > d u CD CD EH o CD d o CO d P. w m o CD 8 a .3 n d '■£ d CO CD +=> U o o a q-i o CD d o N a d d '3 60 d aj O CD a <4-< O CD d o ISJ CD o c N M CO 3 a o 03 -^> d p -t-J <"& 5 P a M m a> ■+3 p w u a Pentagohaster parkinsoni {Forbes) ■ quinquelobus {Gold/.) Stauranderaster bubiferus (Forbes) ocellatus Sladen Eclunoidea. Cidaria clavigera Koenig hirudo Sorignet perornafca Forbes sceptrifera Mcmt. aerrif era Forbes Cyphosoma koenigi Mant. ... spp Helicodiadema fragile (Wilts.) ... Conulua albogalerus Leshe aubrotundus Mant. [" Echinoconua "] Echinoeorys acutatua Leshe (pyramidate) ... (subgibbous) ... Epiaster gibbus (Lam.) Hagenovia rostrata (Forbes) Holaster placenta Agass planus (Mant.) Micraster coranguinum (Leshe) ... cortestudinarium (Gold/.) ... precursor Rowe Annelida. Serpula ampullacea J. de C. Sow. cincta Gold/. granulata J. de C. Snw. ilium Gold/. ... plana S. Woodw. plexus J. de C. Sow. turbinella /. de C, Soto. sp Bryozoa. Cheilostomata. Cribrilina dibleyi Brydone sp Gargantua hippocrepis (Gold/.) ... — X B — X X X J X X X X ? X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X G G X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X y 40 CHALK FOSSILS. Lower Chalk. Middle Chalk. Upper Chalk. List of Fossils (Chalk) — continued. a .5 > a CD O cd 02 O CD a o N3 CO d to o X! O "bb 02 o a o CD a o N & '> d o CD el o CD d o d "3 ■+= .a CD E-i o CD CI o d d "o w o CD d o S3 a .3 t5 d -+j «2 at -*^ o o o CO d o a d d "3 so d O o a m o CD d o N CD o N n m o d "S CD C3 d & CD -"'§* ^ s 'SI -a ffl K 'a cc U Membranipora elliptica Reuss francqana ((d'Orb.) grandis (d'Orb.) Micropora confluens (Reuss) Onychocella lamarcki (v. Sag.) ... depressa (v. Hag.) ... sp Smittipora obliqua (d'Orb.) Cyclostomata. Apsendesia cretacea (d'Orb.) Berenicea gracilis (M. Edw.) var. tenuis Reuss papyracea (d'Orb.) ... papillosa (Reuss) polystoma (Roem.) ... Clausa globulosa (d'Orb.) Entalophora virgula (v. Hag.) Meliceritites lonsdalei Greg. Proboscina angustata (d'Orb.) ... orassa (Roem.) var. alectodes Greg. radiolitorum (d'Orb.) Stomatopora granulata (It. Edw.) ■ gracilis (M. Edw.) Brachiopoda. Crania egnabergensis Retz. Kingena lima (Defr.) Rhynchonella cuvieri d'Orb. plicatilis (J. Sow.) reedensis Eth. Terebratula biplicata J. Sow. aff. carnea ./. Sow. ... — — semiglobosa J. Sow Terebratulina lata Eth. ... striata Dav Thecidium wetherelli Morris Lamellibra NCHIA TA . Dimyodon nilssoni (v. Hag.) Inoceramus brongniarti J. de C. Sow cripsi? Mant. — X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X CHALK FOSSILS. 41 Lower Chalk. Middle Chalk. Upper Chalk. List of Fossils (Chalk) — continued. to a .& > CD o 3 o 02 =t-t O Q> 1=1 O SI CO co o o "5> .a s GO a O cd a O si '> 3 o o a O CD CI O N CCS 03 _g "3 +=» at H O CD O S] co a a "5 "o W q-i o CD fl O S] a a •v a -^> CO CD -^> O CJ a O CD a o N a a '3 a cS O O O CD a o N CD Pq o S3 n CO 3 fl '§ Hi a 5 CO CD -> 2* 2 3 a: ffl CO CO a Inoceramus cuvieri J. de C. Sow. ... involutus J. de C. Soiv. latus? Gold/. mytiloides Mant tenuis? Mant. sp.* Lima (Limatula) decussata Gold/. (Plagiostoma) globosa (/. de C. Sow.) hoperi Mant. ... Ostrea hippopdium Nilss lateralis Nilss. semiplana? Mant vesicularis (Lam.) • wegmanniana a" Orb. Pecten (Chlamys) cretosus Defr.... (Neithea) quinquecostatus J. Sow. sexcostatus S. Woodw. Septifer lineatus (J. de C. Sow.) ... Spondylus dutempleanus d'Orb. ... latus (J. Sow.) spinosus (■/. Sow.) Gasteropoda. Avellana cf. humboldti Midler ... Cephalopoda. Actinocamax granulatus (de Blainv.) ... verus Miller Baculites bohemicus Fritsch & Schloenb. Scaphites geinitzi ? (d'Orb.) sp Crustacea. Pollicipes glaber Boem Pisces. Lamna appendiculata Agass. X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X ? X X X X X X X X X X X X G X X X X X G X X G X X G B G X X X X X X X X X * H. Woods, ' The Mollusca of the Chalk Kock : Part II,' Quart. Journ, Qeol. See,, vol. liii., 1897, Pl.xxyii., fig. 17, 42 CHAPTER VI. READING BEDS. The Reading Beds— the oldest member of the Eocene System recognized in this district — occur at the surface in a narrow belt of country, 200 yards to hal£-a-mile in width, extending from Kingsclere, on the north-west, to Clare Park, near Farnham, on the south-east ; and in two small outlying tracts near Crondall, in the latter part of the area. Their main boundary runs parallel with the axis of an anticlinal flexure (see p. 77), which has the steeper dip on its north-eastern side, and which influences the course of erosion in much the same way as would a fault with a downthrow to the north-east. To the south-west of the axis of the flexure the Reading Beds have been stripped off the Chalk, or nearly so, while to the north-east they have suffered but little erosion. Their outcrop is marked by a longitudinal depression, made up of a succession of small aligned valleys, which slope, alternately, north-westwards and south- eastwards. This feature is well marked near Wolverton, Sherborne St. John, Chineham, and Nately Scures (see also Fig. 2, p. 36). The Reading Beds form a well-defined series of vari-coloured clays, loams, and sands. At their base there is a bed of laminated glauconitic loam, two to five feet thick, containing seams of a more purely clayey and sandy nature, and one or more layers of green-coated and black flints, together with a few small pebbles of quartz. The flints occur in every stage of attrition, little-worn nodules (usually of corroded or gnarled aspect) being mixed in varying proportions \uth sub-angular fragments of nodules and well-rounded pebbles. Layers of oyster-shells, such as are commonly found at this horizon in other parts of the country, seem to be rare in the Basingstoke district. Here as elsewhere, this greenish, pebbly ' Bottom-bed ' is a persistent feature of the formation : it is traceable along the Chalk outcrop, met with in wells in the country to the north, and its debris is frequently seen in superficial deposits far out on the Chalk downs to the south. The overlying beds are, as usual, of variable character. At the outcrop, and especially near the eastern and western limits of the district, there is a preponderance of mottled clays and loams, though these are replaced, to a large extent, by sandy beds, presenting some abnormal features, between Basing and Upper Nately. ' Leaf-beds,' such as are found at Reading and in other localities, seem to be wanting. The average thickness of the Reading Beds in this part of the country is probably a little less than 70 feet. The well-sections known to the writer show from 63 feet to 75 feet, and in two instances a thickness of between 67 and 69 feet was proved. Relations with the Chalk. — The junction of the Reading Beds and the Chalk is exposed in few places, but the surface of the READING BEDS. 43 latter appears to be even. In two places where an undisturbed junction could be seen the top of the Chalk showed the perforations or ' crypts ' of some boring animal (see above, p. 36). No clear evidence, of the unconformity known to exist between the Eocene Beds and the Chalk has been observed. The Reading Series seems everywhere to rest upon beds at or very near the upper limit of the Marsupites Zone (see Fig. 2). This relation appears to hold good all along the line of the main Chalk outcrop on the south side of the London Basin between Savernake and Farnham, a distance of 40 miles. From 3 to 20 miles north of that line, however, in the neighbourhood of Hungerf ord and of Reading, the Reading Beds, near their northern outcrop, come in contact with the Zone of Micr aster coranguinum ; while in the country around Andover and Alresf ord, 10 to 15 miles to the south of it, the Actinocamax quadratus Zone is well represented. Hence it seems that the line in question runs transversely to the direction of the Lower Eocene overstep, and approximately parallel with the pre-Eocene strike of the Chalk.* Notes of Exposures. The principal sections will be reviewed in three groups, namely, those in the main mass of the beds (1) west and (2) east of the River Loddon, and (3) those in the outliers. 1. West of the River Loddon. — About one furlong north-east of The Dell at Kingsclere a well dug in 1908 (and noticed above, p. 31) passed obliquely through the lower beds of the Reading Series, dipping northward at an unascertained, but probably rather high, angle. Evidence of the following descending succession was seen in the heap3 of material removed from the excavation : — Soil and wash. "Dark-grey stiff clay. Mottled red sandy clay, with small calcareous con- cretions (race). Bottom-bed : green loam and sand, with thin seams of laminated grey clay (pebbles absent?). Chalk : ironstained and traversed by thin interlacing veins of earthy iron-ore at the top. A small trial-pit north-east of the well showed grey sandy clay, with red mottlings, beneath a thin wash of stony loam. About 100 yards to the east of this spot, and on the south side of the road from Kingsclere to Wolverton, a little red-brown clay is visible in the rough, slipped ground which marks the site of a former excavation (probably a brick-pit). Farther east there seem to be no exposures short of Ewhurst, where a little mottled clay is shown in the banks of the ponds in the park east of Ewhurst Farm. * See White, ' Geology of the country around Hungerford and Newbury ' (Mem. Geol. Survey], 1907, p. 43. f By reason of the dip, this measurement (furnished by Dr, Joscelyne, of kingsclere) is somewhat in excess of the true thickness. Reading Beds (24* ft.).t < 44 EOCENE. The following section of a well near Ewhurst Church was given to Sir J. Prestwich from recollection by the man who had made it a few years previously : — " Well-section, Ewhurst. Woolwich and Reading Series. f f. Red and blue mottled clay j e. Blue clay with pebbles j d. Black clay with small oysters 1 o. A bright ore (iron pyrites) j b. Coal (lignite) la. Green sand and gravel (flints) 20 15 15 3 7 2 "Chalk 62 17. Prestwich thought that there was " some mistake in these measurements," but believed " the order of succession and the occurrence of lignite (b) to be correct."* In the small copses at the foot of the chalk slope between Ewhurst and Monk Sherborne Church Mr. J. H. Blake saw occasional indications of mottled clay and of the green Bottom- bed. In the now-overgrown pits of the old brickyard at Kiln Green, north-west of Monk Sherborne Church, Mr. H. W. Bristow observed red mottled clay, covered by ferruginous-brown sandy clay, and underlain by white and yellow sands " with bright carmine streaks and patches."! At Monk Sherborne Bectory, a quarter of a mile north (a little east) of the church, a well made in 1887 passed through 67 feet of strata between the London Clay and the Chalk (for details see Appendix, p. 108). Here the Reading Beds consist almost entirely of clay and sandy clay, the coloured sands seen at the Kiln Green pits, about three furlongs to the west, having died out in the interval. At Sherborne Brickyard, at the south-eastern end of Sherborne St. John and one-third of a mile south-east of the church, the eastern face of the workings showed, in 1907 : — Soil. Reading ( Dark grey, red-mottled clay, reddish-brown loam, and brown Beds. ( loamy sand, dipping north-east, at about 7°. The thickness of the beds exposed appeared to be about 40 feet, but neither at that time nor in 1904 were the sections seen by the writer at all clear. The lower beds seemed disturbed and their limits were ill-defined. According to H. W. Bristow, the highest beds of the formation here are sandy (see section, Fig. 4, p. 52). In the belt of low ground between Sherborne St. John and Basing the brightly- coloured mottled clays are easily traceable, and, though good exposures are wanting, there are clear indications of the presence of sand, in some thickness, in the upper part of the * ' On the Structure of the Strata between the London Clay and the Chalk, &c, Part II., The Woolwich and Reading Series,' Quart. Journ. Geol. Soe., vol x 1854 pp. 96, 97. ' t In ' Geology of Parts of Berkshire and Hampshire ' {Mem, Geol. Surrey} 1862 p. 24. READING BEDS. 45 series. At Chineham (or Chinham), however, the upper beds are of a more argillaceous character, and in the cutting on the Basing- stoke and Reading Branch of the Great Western Railway Prest- wich saw the London Clay resting on a " slightly uneven and worn " surface of mottled clay.* In a well (bored through London Clay) half a mile east of Four Lanes Farm, north of Basing, the thickness of the Reading Beds was found to be 68^ feet. Here the highest beds are sandy, and between 40 and 50 feet of the formation is of this character (see Appendix, p. 109). 2. East of the R. Loddon. — At Basing the Reading Beds are markedly arenaceous, though clay is present, mostly near the middle of the series. Mr. Blake noted 20 feet of sand immediately below the London Clay at Basing Kiln east of Oliver's Battery, and 12 feet of coarse brown sand on the north bank of the canal, at a point a quarter of a mile east of Basing Church. The lower part of the Bottom-bed, containing many green- stained flint-pebbles, is well shown at the top of the canal-cutting on the west side of the short tunnel north-north-east of Mapledurwell. Low islands of clay (believed to belong to the Reading Beds) rise above the alluvium of Andwell Moor, between the branches of the Lyde near Nately Scures, and mottled clay, pertaining to the upper part of the formation, was noticed by Mr. Blake in the channel of a little brook south-east of Andwell Mill ; but at Upper Nately there is a considerable development of coloured sands, which are well exposed in pits near the church. As the sections at Upper Nately are among the clearest, and are certainly the most interesting, exposures of the Reading Beds at present to be seen in the district, they will be described in some detail. The lower beds of the formation are shown on the south side of the Basingstoke Canal, in an old brickyard west of the church. The eastern bank of the yard shows, near its southern end, 12 feet of light greenish-yellow glauconitic sand, distinctly current-bedded, and containing seams and lenticles of black and green, imperfectly- rounded flint-pebbles (mostly small, but ranging up to 3 inches in diameter), and a few pebbles of quartz (to -^ inch in diameter). The sand dips gently northward, and is cut out by a thickening of the overlying drift-loam at the northern end of the section, but is again exposed, at a lower level, in the north-east corner of the brickyard. On the west side of the yard, at a slightly higher' level than the first of the two exposures just noticed, the southernmost of a group of small excavations shows : — Feet. Superficial : Grey clay and loam containing irregular bands and masses of red-mottled clay and of unworn and pebbly flints to 5 * ' The Basement Bed of the London Clay,' Quart. Journ. Oeol. Soc, vol. vi., 1850, p. 259. 12761 D 46 EOCENE. Reading Beds. Feet f 3. Pure white and speckled fine sand (stained red by iron oxide at the top) containing flat, ovate concretions or doggers of firm, white, non- calcareous sandstone (1 to 2 feet in maximum diameter) -. and passing down into, 2. Sandstone ; friable to firm and hard ; mostly white, with small black specks, but stained red at the top ; broken by joints into large tabular masses 1. White sand seen for less than Some blocks of the sandstone (bed 2) have been placed at the side of the lane to the west of the brickyard. The largest measures about 7x5x1^ feet. Another pit, a few yards north-east of the last and at the same level, shows : — 6 to 7 ■toll 1 Made ground and wash : red-mottled clay mixed with flints ... to ("Alternations of laminated brown and grey loam, grey fireclay, and grey stiff clay with red •mottlings, (rather obscure) about Sandstone, similar to, and continuous with, that L forming bed (2) of the last section Reading , Beds. I Feet. 2 10 1 toll The next section, 30 or 40 yards north-east of the last and at a slightly lower level (but higher horizon ?) shows 4 feet of brown and red-brown rather coarse sand traversed by numerous inter- secting, ribbon-like seams of hard iron-sandstone, and closely resembling, in general aspect, the ferruginous sands of the Folkestone Beds in the northern part of the Weald district. At the northern end of the yard the ironstone beds are overlain by a considerable thickness of made ground and of drift-loam with scattered worn and unworn flints ; but the ascending sequence of the beds is resumed on the north side of the road from Hatch to Greywell, in the narrow strip of uneven ground between that road and the canal. Mottled clay, apparently in situ, is seen in the road banks just south of the bridge over the canal, and, at a level a few feet higher, a small field-pit 150 yards north-west of the church exhibits the following section : — Soil ; loamy, thin. Feet. '4. Conglomerate, consisting of subangular and rounded pieces of pale-grey, soft fire-clay, and of friable, coarse brown sandstone, in a matrix of rather coarse brown sand ... 6 to 7 Coarse brown sand with lenticles and pebbles of soft, grey fire-clay, and spheroidal con- Reading J cretions of iron-sandstone filled with loose Beds. ' sand 3 2. .Grey laminated clay with thin irregular lenticles and seams of sand containing pebbles of day seen for 3 (Section obscured) 1. Brown loam, seen a few feet, below the visible L base of bed (2) 1 In the above section the stratification is uneven, but shows a prevailing slight dip to the north. The upward succession is continued in the north bank of the canal-cutting, where some small pits, opened in 1908, show 8 feet READING BEDS. 47 £ ^ ■+= o O >4 «H W o v — ' jq w Sfs fl -^J- ^ ,-H 1 53 O eS &3 ^3 : a -si "IS 'oil e . « -t-3 ft? -=; 1-o > 03 a o ■ fW o 2Q 1 © | u a CO W (H Q w ^ "q '//i. ^3 f o QQ c« T3T3 ■ - pi- ts -£ PI "3 CI « O « *"# vC '.£> o d el c . o 13 3 eg « to •?m| WPhCQ M an a W *fO Vermetus bognoriensis Sow. (Vermicularia) Bbyozoa. Plustra Brachiopova. Lingula tenuis Sow. Terebratula striatula Mant. L A MELLIBRA NCHIA TA . Anomia lineata Lam. Area impolita ' Sow. Astarte donacina Sov>. Avicula media Sow. Cardium nitens Sow. plumsteadiense ? Sow. X X X X X X X X X 58 LONDON CLAY FOSSILS. List of Fossils (J. Prestwich) (London Clay) — continued. Fourth Zone (lowest). si ■31 .as <-> CI 60 . S ,-k ■a sp 2ffl Third Zone. - a) ft =8 Second Zone. 0J H a is Cultellua affinis Soio. (Solen) Cyprina planata Sow. sp Cytherea obliqua Lam. (= C. tenuistriata Sow.) Cytherea suberycinoides Desh. ... sp. Modiola elegans Sow. depressa Sow. subcarinata Sow Nucula amygdaloides Sow. lunulata ? Nyst similis Sow. (N. margaritacea Desh.) Ostrea bellovacina Desh. var. pulchra Sow. oymbula ? Desh. flabellula Lam. {large species) Panopoea intermedia Sow. (Corbula dubia Desh.) Pecten corneus Sow. ... Pectunculus brevirostris Sort) deoussatus Sow. Pholadomya dixoni ? Sow. margaritacea Sou;. virgulosa Sow. Pinna affinis Sovi. ... (n. s[p.], a very large one) Venericardia Venus {small species) SCAPHOPDA. Dentalium nitens Desh Gasteropoda. Acteon simulatus Sow Ancillaria {same sp. as at Highgate) Buccinum junceum Sow. ...' Bulla sp Cancellaria lsevisoula Soto. Cassidaria carinata Lam. ... striata Sow Cerithium sp. Cyprsea prestwichii Edw Corbula {small new species) Fusus angusticostatus ? Mell bulbiformis Lam. (F. bulbus .Brand.) carinella Sow. errans Sow - trilineatus Sow. X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X LONDON CLAY FOSSILS. 59 List of Fossils (J. Prestwich) (London Clay) — continued. Fourth Zone (lowest). Si .3.3 Is 5's Third Zone. 0) p Second Zone. 3 a a -a a Fnsus tuberosus Sow (two new species) Globulus depressus Sow Murex cristatus Sow Natica glaucinoides Sow. (N. labellata Lam.). hantonenis Pilk. Pleurotoma elegans Mell rostrata Sow. ... • (four new species) (two new species) Pseudoliva obtusa Sow. (Bucoinum obtu- sum Desh.). Pyramidella sp Pyrula smithii Sow. — — tricostata Desh. Bingicula turgida Sow Bostellaria lucida Sow sowerbii Mam. (small n.s\_p]., same as at Clarendon) Scalaria undosa Sow. (new species, large) ... Solarium patulum Sow Teredo antenauta Sow Trivia (Cyprsea Sow.) Turritella imbricataria Lam sulcifera Lam. sp Typhis muticus Sow. Voluta elevata Sow. ... Cephalopoda. Nautilus imperialis Soiv sowerbii Sow. Pisces. jEtobatis (teeth) Lamna elegans Ag. (teeth) spp Myliobatis (bones or teeth) X X X X x x X X x X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X 60 CHAPTER VIII. LOWER BAGSHOT BEDS. The district under notice includes the south-western part of the main mass of the Lower Bagshot Beds in the London Basin, on the east, and the southern part of the large outlier of Silchester and Pamber Forest, towards the west. Smaller outliers occur near the borders of these principa). spreads in the neighbourhood of Crondall, Odiham, Mattingley, Sherborne St. John, and Wolver- ton, and others form or cap the low hills and ridges in the rolling London-Clay country between the Whitewater and the Loddon. In the few good exposures of the beds at their junction there seems to be a passage from the London Clay into the Lower Bagshot Beds ; the indistinctly-stratified London Clay, always arenaceous in its upper part, becoming markedly so at a distance of a few feet or a few inches below the distinctly-bedded, clay-seamed sand of the Lower Bagshot Series. The latter formation consists of alternating beds of evenly- stratified or current-bedded sands, and of fine, laminated sandy clays ; the former usually of red-brown, buff, or yellow tints but occasionally light-grey or white, the latter commonly light-grey, (impure pipe-clay) and liver- or chocolated-coloured. Pebble-beds, which are a rather conspicuous feature of the Lower Bagshots in the country near Newbury, to the north-west, are here very thin and inconstant. The Lower Bagshot Beds exhibit some of the variability of the Reading Series, the sands frequently thickening at the expense of the clays, and vice versa, though the lateral changes are, on the whole, less abrupt than in that series. The clays are best developed in the lower half of the formation, and exceptionally-thick beds of this character, when situated near the base, are usually termed ' Eamsdell Clay.' Lignite occurs in the lower beds, but, so far as the writer is aware, no other organic remains have been met with locally. Casts of mollusca found in the country to the east indicate that the formation is, at least in part, of marine origin. The average thickness of the Lower Bagshot Beds in this district seems to be between 50 and fiO feet, but there are places where there appears to be room for not more than 30 to 40 feet of strata between the London Clay and the Bracklesham Beds. Notes of Exposures. West of the R. Loddon. — The outlier of Great Knowl Hill, north- east of Kingsclere, is, for the most part, of small thickness. Brown and white current-bedded sand, near the base of the formation, is exposed in a small pit south-east of Dairy House Farm, and red-brown sand with the seams of clay, probably at a higher horizon, is seen in the banks of the high road half-a-mile east of Harriden Farm. This outlier terminates on the south in a sandy bluff crowned with fir-trees. LOWER BAGSHOT BEDS. 61 In the adjacent outlier of Wolverton Wood, Mr. F. J. Bennett noted greenish clay and ferruginous sand in a pit (now degraded) on the east side of Sandford Farm. Brown loamy sand shows in the road-banks south-west of Wolverton Church. Although few sections are to be seen in the large outlier of Pamber Forest and Bramley, it is apparent that the Lower Bagshot Beds there contain a good deal of clay or loam. The highest strata, however, are more sandy, and J. H. Blake noted indications of light-coloured sand at the Lower Bagshot outcrop in many places. The following description of the lower beds of the formation, exposed in Ramsdell Brickyard, in the eastern angle of the cross- roads by Ramsdell Church, is taken from the Geological Survey Memoir on ' The Geology of Parts of Berkshire and Hampshire ' (Sheet 12, Old Series), published in 1862. "At Ramsdell brickyard," writes Mr. H. W. Bristow, "yellow and white sands and clays form the uppermost five or six feet of the section, and pass downwards into a sort of ferruginous, pale brown and white clay, not unlike some beds of the London Clay, and here used for making tiles . . . " At the northern end of the brickyard, by the roadside, the beds appear to be more laminated and sandy than is the case on the south side, and a laminated chocolate-coloured clay has been dug for making bricks, from beneath the laminated sands and clays already described as forming the upper part of the section." " This clay, which may be called the Ramsdell Clay, is of great thickness, and is remarkable for the strong resemblance which it bears to the more clayey and ferruginous beds of the London Clay. This resemblance is so great that Mr. Trench, as well as myself, both of whom had considerable experience in surveying the Lower Tertiary Beds, were in the first instance deceived by its appearance, and referred the clay in question to London Clay when making the geological survey of this neighbourhood. It became evident, however, on further examination, that the brown Ramsdell Clay formed a part, in reality, of the Lower Bagshot Series, and that this great development of clay was not confined to our present area, but that it prevailed more or less over other portions of the district [of Sheet 12]. This was proved, beyond the possibility of doubt, by means of the underlying sands of the Lower Bagshot Series, resting upon clay belonging unquestionably to the London Clay formation. On a close examination it was also remarked that the Ramsdell Clay bore a kind of resemblance to the pipe-clays of common occurrence in the Bagshot Beds ; and for this reason, probably, it is adapted for making tiles (a purpose for which London Clay is seldom suitable), being an impure or imperfect pipe-clay, intermediate in quality between the true Bagshot Pipeclays and the more sandy beds of ordinary London Clay. " The Ramsdell Clay has been sunk through in making a well at the south side of the yard for twenty-seven or twenty-eight feet, at which depth a sandy loam was reached, which yielded a plentiful supply of very good water. It was also seen in a pit at the back of Mr. Kimber's house [? north-east of the brickyard], where it is ferruginous, very tough, and fit for making tiles. In the process of drying, consequent on exposure to the air, it shrinks and cracks very much in a vertical direction, so that it splits from the face of the cutting in narrow slabs or wedge- shaped masses. The clay contains sandy nodules of iron [oxide] resulting from decomposed pyrites, and towards the lower part of the section exposed (where it seems to become more sandy, and to approximate more closely in character to the passage-beds into London Clay), it contains much green matter in the form of minute green specks, as in the London Clay of Alum Bay, in the Isle of Wight."* * Op, cit.,v. 39. 12761 E 62 EOCENE. The section now shown in the brickyard at Ramsdell jkffe™ "» many respects from that described by Bristow in 1862. lne descending succession seen by the present writer, in 1907-8, was as follows (fig. 6) : — T3 o is o Superficial : Light-coloured sand and loam, containing scattered flints and small pockets of flint gravel, and passing down into darker loam and clay with small scattered flints Feet. 1 to 4 LOWER BAGSHOT BEDS. 63 Feet. '5. Orange and yellpw, slightly argillaceous, laminated sand with grey mottlings ... to 6 4. Bright-yellow and buff loamy sand with numerous seams of stiff grey clay ... 64 3. Chocolate-coloured, laminated, stiff clay Lower Bagshot __, with carbonaceous seams ; passing down Beds. ■> into darker chocolate-coloured loam full of small rolled pieces of black and dark- brown lignite. This bed thins out southward ; where thickest it is about 2i ^2. Pale grey laminated sandy clay 4 to 7 fl. Brown and grey sandy clay and loam, Lower Bagshot j poorly exposed in a number of small Beds or -J degraded pits in the southern and south- London Clay I eastern parts of the yard ; total thickness L seen not more than 15 In this section the " Ramsdell Clay " is not recognisable. The full thickness of the strata exposed is about 30, feet, and as this is approximately the difference between the altitudes of the road and the small water-course which form, respectively, the higher (or northern) and the lower (or southern) limits of the brickyard, it is improbable that a much greater thickness of strata was to be seen here at the time of the first geological survey of the district. The only clay which answers to Bristow's description of the Ramsdell Clay is that which forms the upper part (0 to 1| feet) of the thin, lignitic, chocolate-coloured bed (No. 3). When measured by the writer, in 1908, this bed was, at most, only 2\ feet thick, and there was nothing to suggest a rapid thickening towards the middle of the yard. The sandy clay and loam (bed 1), seen at rather lower levels, were regarded as part of the London Clay by Mr. J. H. Blake, who, in revising the geological boundaries for Sheet 284, drew the line for the outcrop of the London Clay through the brickyard, instead of one third of a mile to the south of it as Bristow did. This alteration in the mapping — whereby a considerable thickness of strata which Bristow assigned to the Lower Bagshot Beds is credited to the underlying formation — appears to be justified by the evidence at present available ; but, in view of Bristow's remarks on the difficulty of distinguishing the Ramsdell Clay from the London Clay, it is to be regretted that Blake left no note of his reasons for making this change. Bristow does not say what thickness of Ramsdell Clay was visible in his time, and it is possible that he was mistaken in referring to the clay in question the whole " twenty-seven or twenty-eight feet " of beds " sunk through in making a well at the southern [and lower] side of the yard " (see above, p. 61). Whether this was the case or not, little, if any, of his Ramsdell Clay is now to be seen at Ramsdell. At the north-eastern end of Tadley there are small openings in the upper part of the Lower Bagshot Beds. In one of these pits Mr. F. J. Bennett noted :— Feet t„„„_t> „i,„4. f Brown loam 4 JUower Hagsnot 1 -r, , ,., -, o Beds 1 Brown and white sand o (Loamy sand — ; and buff sand with seams of grey clay close by, at a rather lower level. 12761 E 2 64 EOCENE. At Little London, south-east of Tadley, a recent excavation in a large overgrown sand-pit about one furlong north-east ot Ihe Plough " inn* shows the following section of the junction ot the Lower Bagshot and Bracklesham Beds (fig. 7). FlG. 1.— Junction of Lower Bagshot and Bracklesham Beds, Little London. (h.J.O.w.) Scale, 1 inch = 20 feet. 3, 2. Bracklesham loams and clays. jf^f? 5 ?^ 1. Lower Bagshot sand. Sandy and loamy soil containing bleached flints f3. Evenly- stratified and current-bedded red- brown and grey sandy clay, containing many small ferruginous concretions in the upper two feet, and seams of pale grey sandy pipe-clay lower down. A thin uneven seam of pale grey pipe- clay, and some detached ' galls ' or pebbles of the same, at the base 2. Markedly current-bedded grey loam, con- taining seams and subangular pieces of grey clay. This bed thins out northward Evenly-bedded, fine-grained, white and pale greyish-white micaceous sand Feet. tol Bracklesham Beds. to 3 Lower Bagshot ( 1. Beds. I seen for 6 The junction of the sand (1) with the overlying loams (2 and 3) is slightly waved and sharply-defined. A rather similar section was observed in another part of the pit by Bristow, who seems to have regarded all the beds exposed as of Lower Bagshot age.f In the largest of the three small outliers north-east of Monk Sherborne grey clay, acquiring a brown and dull-red mottling when weathered, is seen in the banks of the high road south-east of Salters Heath ; and in the outlier of Beaurepaire Farm, farther east, Mr. Blake noted 6 feet of stratified grey clay and brown loam above 2 feet of orange loamy sand, in a pit (now degraded) a quarter of a mile south-south-west of the farm buildings. East of the River Loddon, the Lower Bagshot Beds are, on the whole, of a more arenaceous character. The outlier of Heckfield Heath consists chiefly of sand. Bright yellow sand is dug on the east side of the main road from Stratfield Turgis to Reading, in places a little beyond the northern boundary of Sheet 284, and about 30 feet of buff and yellow sand, with fine * On Sheet 281 the name of this inn is engraved J inch below (i.e., south of) its correct position, t ' Geology of Parts of Berkshire and Hampshire' {Mem. Qeol. Survey), 1862, p, 40 LOWER BAGSHOT BEDS. 65 seams of grey clay, is accounted for in small exposures in the banks of the hollow road by Danmoor Cottage, near the south-eastern edge of the outlier. Sand predominates also in the northern half of the strip of Lower Bagshot Beds which forms the top of the ridge extending from Turgis Green to Tylney Hall. A considerable thickness of yellow and brown slightly-micaceous sand and friable sandstone, passing down into the brown loams at the top of the London Clay, is indicated in the road-cutting one third of a mile north-west of Lyde Green, and there is light sand in the road-banks east of Old House Farm, near Rotherwick. South of Rotherwick the beds seem to become more argillaceous. Mr. Bristow states that ' Ramsdell Clay ' occurs " on Rotherwick Hill," and that " the Newnham outlier is entirely composed of it, with the exception of one or two feet of sand resting on the London Clay."* . The passage from the grey and brown loamy beds of the highest part of the London Clay into the reddish-brown sand at the base of the Lower Bagshots can be made out in the banks of the road leading down from Newnham to Lyde Mill. A very small unmapped outlier is intersected by the London and South Western Railway cutting a little to the west of Hook Station. The writer is indebted to Mr. H. W. Monckton for the following note of the section shown on the north side of the railway during the widening of the cutting in 1900f: — Feet. "Drift. Sandy gravel 1 [Lower] Bagshot. Yellow sand with lines and laminae of clay ... 2 i London Clay. Grey sandy bed, very carbonaceous, passing down, in 6 inches, into a sandy grey clay ... ... — " Coming now to the main mass of the Lower Bagshot Beds, and the small outliers adjacent thereto, on the eastern side of the River Whitewater : — Yellow and brown sand with seams of clay is dug on the Common at Brams Hill, and can be seen in the banks of the lane leading from that hamlet to Hazeley. On the slope below the cottages on the north side of the same lane near its Hazeley end Mr. J. H. Blake noted a small exposure of the junction with the London Clay. Buff and yellow sand is exposed in many places on the lower slopes of Hazeley Heath, and in this neighbourhood the formation seems to contain little else. The same kind of sediment is shown in a pit at the north-western end of the West Green outlier, and five feet of stratified loam, near the base of the Lower Bagshots, in road-banks south-east of Dipley. Mr. Bristow (quoting a MS. note by Mr. R. Trench) states that the ' Ramsdell Clay ' was used for brickmaking south-west of Hartley Row, " where the section was described by the brickmaker to be as follows : — Feet. " Ramsdell Clay (Lower Bagshot) 8 Sand, with iron concretions, and giving out water 1 Blue London Clay -+" * Op. oit., p. 41. t This section is mentioned in Proc. Geol. Assoc, vol. xvi., 1900, p. 519. t ' Geology of Parts of Berkshire and Hampshire,' p. 41. 66 EOCENE. At the western end of the Shapley Heath cutting on the London and South Western Railway Mr. Clement Reid noted a well which was " sunk 28 feet into the Bagshot Sand, i.e., about 25 feet below the level of the rails."* " Exactly opposite the western edge of 01dman['sJ Copset the cutting is shallow, and shows : — Feet. " Bracklesham (Laminated light-coloured'(weathered) and car- \ 1Q [Beds]. | bonaceous loams. ) [Lower] Bagshot ( Fine white, much false-bedded, sand with clay- ) 17 j„ [Beds] . \ pebbles (dug to below rail-level ) ) Buff and grey sand with seams of clay, belonging to the lower part of the Lower Bagshot Beds, is dug to a depth of 10 feet in a road-side pit about a quarter of a mile south-west of the last section, and in another, north of Potbridge, where a small patch of Plateau Gravel is shown on the map. In this part of the district the Lower Bagshot Beds appear'to be not more than 50 feet thick, though Sir J. Prestwich's estimate is nearly twice as great. § Between Potbridge and the eastern limit of the Basingstoke district the only good section observed occurs on the south-western spur of Beacon Hill, at a spot half a mile east-north-east of Redlands, near Crondall. This shows : — Feet. Superficial : Subangular and pebbly flint gravel mixed with brown sand and grey sandy clay to 6 ' 3. Brown sand with thin seams of soft iron- sandstone 5 2. Slightly-sandy grey clay with light-red Lower Bagshot j and pink mottlings ; an irregular seam Beds. "] of flint-pebbles at the base to 2 | 1. Reddish-brown and yellow, stratified sand, with laminse and rolled pieces of grey, (_ pink-mottled pipe-clay 10 to 15 Owing, probably, to hill-side creep, the beds here are much disturbed, and broken by small faults which are most conspicuous in the lower sand (1). * MS. note quoted by H. W. Monckton in Proe. Geol. Assoc, vol. xvi., 1900, p. 520. f This copse is on the south side of the railway, and is indicated, but not named, on the one-inch map. J C. Reid, ibid., loc. cit. § ' On the main points of Structure and the probable Age of the Bagshot Sands, &c.,' Quart. Jonm. Geol. Soc, vol. iii., 18£7, p. 381. His estimate of " about 100 feet " for the thickness of the " Lower Bagshot Sands " at Shapley Heath, appears to include about 10 feet of strata now referred to the Bracklesham Beds. 67 CHAPTER IX. BRACKLESHAM (OR MIDDLE BAGSHOT) BEDS. The principal masses of this formation occur in the north-eastern part of the district, and an interval of more than seven miles sepa- rates these from the nearest of a group of small outliers in the Pamber Forest area, to the west of the River Loddon. The Bracklesham Beds consist, in the main, of evenly-bedded loams and sands — commonly grey and greenish-grey when un- weathered, but acquiring brown, red-brown, and orange tints on exposure. The constituent beds are, on the whole, more persistent than those of the Lower Bagshot, and a band of dark-green, glau- conitic, loamy sand (10 to 15 feet), which occasionally yields sharks' teeth and remains of marine mollusca, occurs with great constancy in the lower half of the formation. Laminated sandy clays and loams, of varying thickness, separate the green bed from the Lower Bagshot sands, and a thicker group of sandy clays occurs above it. Locally, and especially in the western outliers, the higher loams are largely replaced by light- coloured, glauconitic sand ; and the topmcst bed of the series is a loamy sand, containing scattered flint pebbles in its lower part, and hardly distinguishable in small exposures from the overlying pebbly bottom-bed of the Upper Bagshots. In the district under consideration the Bracklesham Beds have a thickness of 50 to 60 feet. Notes of Exposures. West of the River Loddon. — There is reason to believe that a small unmapped outlier occurs in the ridge to the north of the village of Wolverton. Its existence was suspected by Mr. H. W. Bristow, whose description of some road-side exposures formerly visible there is appended : — "On the north side of Woolverton [Wolverton], west [i.e. south-west] of the .' Hare and Hounds,' G-lauoonite-sands, perhaps of Bracklesham age, were noticed under the park paling, in the bank through which the road is cut. A few white and black, scattered flint-pebbles occurred at the base of these upper sands, which rested on other sands of a bright orange colour. These last were also hard and somewhat clayey, with white laminae, and most likely formed the uppermost part of the Lower Bagshot Beds. " Beds succeeding them, in descending order, are exposed in a roadside sand- pit about fifty yards further, in an easterly [north-eastward] direction. They consist of bright-coloured ferruginous, or orange-yellow sand, and yellow and white sand laminated with clay. Small iron-nodules, perhaps derived from decaying pyrites are also occasionally present. The following section will afford a notion of the nature of the beds disclosed : — 1. Laminated sand and clay. 2. Pale grey, or french-white sand. 3. Bright yellow sand. 4. Pale grey or french-white pipe clay, with a carbonaceous layer on the top. 5. Hard and irregular ferruginous layer. 6. Bright yellow laminated sand, passing downwards into paler (or white) sand." ° * In ' Geology of Parts of Berkshire and Hampshire ' (Mem. Geol. Survey'), 1862, p. 42. 68 EOCENE. The sand-pit is now sloped and over-grown, and the other ex- posures seen by Bristow, at a higher level, no longer exist ; but in a deep ditch on the south-east side of the road, at a point 50 yards north-east of the " Hare and Hounds " inn, loamy glauconitic sand was exposed, for a depth of about one foot, in 1907. This sand is of a bottle-green tint, contains an abundance of glauconite grains, and exactly resembles the green-sand bed of the lower part of the Bracklesham Series. If it belongs to that series, as the present writer believes, the laminated sands and clays overlain by " glauconite-sand," seen by Bristow in the pit and road-banks at higher levels to the south- west, may be safely referred to the same formation. The rather quick rise in the ground which occurs near the inn is noteworthy in this connection, for at Tadley and at Baughurst, north-east of Wolverton, a similar feature marks the oncoming of beds which are acknowledged to be of Bracklesham age. There appears to be about 50 feet of Bracklesham Beds in the thickest part of the well-marked outlier which forms the hill (Browning Hill) to the east of Baughurst. Green sand, near the base of the formation, can be seen on the slopes of the low spur which supports Baughurst church, and a clear section of part of the overlying beds is shown in the lane leading to a farm one furlong east of that edifice. The descending succession seen here is : — Feet. Soil, loamy, with bleached flints ... 1£ f Grey, glauconitic sandy clay, weathering red-brown 2 -r, 1 1 t, | Orange-coloured sand (1 ft.), passing down into buff Bracklesnam ^ gand ^ f ^ 6 J l | Light-grey sand, with fine grains of glauconite, |_ seen for 2 Mr. J. H. Blake noted indications of sandy clay and of green sand on the higher ground to the north-east of the above section. Green sand occurs also in the banks of the road across the outlier of Tadley Place Farm, between Browning Hill Farm and West Heath ; and mottled red-brown and grey clay is exposed on the western side of the Reading road on the northern slope of the outlier at Tadley. At the northern end of Little London, and on the west side of the road through that village, bricks formerly were made with " pale grey pipeclay five feet in thickness, and passing upwards into four or five feet of french-grey clay, which becomes mottled with bright red, owing to the peroxidation of the iron." * These clays were classed with the Lower Bagshot Beds by Bristow. The brick- yard has long been disused, and the workings are now clothed with turf. The sand-pit section showing the base of the Bracklesham Beds (described above, p. 64) is situated 200 yards to the east of this, and at a slightly lower level. Yellow and red-brown sandy loam, with a few green grains, is exposed in the road-side ditches in the northern part of the Little * Bristow, op. cit., pp. 39, 40. His remarks on the position of the Bracklesham outliers in this neighbourhood are difficult to follow {of. Sheet 12). BRACKLESHAM BEDS. 69 London outlier ; and mottled clay, rather like that of the Reading Beds, occurs in a field-ditch a quarter of a mile north-west of the chapel. East of the Loddon. — In the Hazeley outlier the green-sand bed, and the laminated clays and loams above and below it, are exposed in many places on the western parts of the Heath. At Hazeley a road-bank, about 100 yards north of the " Shoulder of Mutton " inn, shows 3 feet of dark-green glauconitic sand, with small concretions of red iron-sandstone, resting upon, and filling irregular fissures in, grey-brown laminated sandy clay. These beds are better shown in the high banks of the road to Mattingley, at a point a little less than a quarter of a mile south-south-east of the same inn. Here the following descending succession can be made out : — Loamy and sandy soil and wash, with small stones to " 3. Speckled green and grey loamy sand, containing seams and irregular veins of brown-red ferru- ginous sandstone (due to the oxidation of the iron in the glauconite) 2. Light grey-brown and pale lavender-coloured, laminated silty clay, slightly micaceous, and traversed by rusty stains Feet 6 Bracklesham Beds. Lower Bag- shot Beds. 1. Buff-coloured slightly loamy sand 10? 20? 3 ? Fig. 8. — Borings in the Bracklesham Beds, Hazeley. (h.j.O.W.) Scale : 1 inch = 2 feet. For a depth of about 1£ feet below its upper surface the clay-bed (2) is perforated by crooked tubular borings, between 1 and 2| inches in diameter, filled with green sand continuous with that forming the overlying bed (3),* see fig. 8. The brickyard pits (mostly disused) on Hazeley Heath, at points about five furlongs west, and half-a-mile south-west, of Purdie's Farm, show altogether about 30 feet of grey-brown laminated sandy clay, belonging to the upper part of the formation. Somewhere in the neighbourhood of the brickyards on the south side of the heath Mr. Bristow noted the Bracklesham lower clay, " of the colour of coarse brown sugar, and pale glauconite-green. . . . underlaid by the dry Lower Bagshot Sands, which are of a . . . paler colour." f A road-cutting near the church to the east of Phoenix Green shows a few feet of fine, buff and greenish, glauconitic sand. Brown sandy clay, near the base of the formation, is eut into along the ditch by the aide of the high-road west of Winchfield House. * Prestwich observed borings in the clay below the green bed in the well-known section at Goldsworthy (or Goldsworth) Hill, near Woking. Quart. Journ. Oeol. Soe., vol. iii., 1847, p. 383. t Oj). cit., pp. 42, 43. 3. Ferruginous green sand. 2. Laminated clay, with borings. 70 EOCENE. By far the best section of the Bracklesham Beds to be seen in this district in recent years was that exposed during the widening of the London and South Western B,ailway cutting at Shapley Heath, in 1899 and 1900 ; see fig. 9. The general character and sequence of the beds displayed in this cutting at the time it was first opened were indicated by Sir J. Prestwich* in 1847, and notes of the recent section appeared in the report of an excursion of the Geologists' Association to "Winchfield and Hook in 1900.| In 1907, when the writer first had occasion to examine the cutting, the section had become much obscured by rain-wash and vegetation, and the details and measurements given below are, for the most part, drawn from unpublished memoranda kindly furnished by Mr. H. W. Monckton, supplemented by Mr. Clement Reid's MS. notes which are in the possession of the Geological Survey. The cutting has a length of rather less than seven furlongs (1,500 yards). A slight eastward dip (exaggerated in fig. 9) carries the beds seen at the western end of the section below the level of the rails at Winchfield Station. The descending succession noted by Mr. Monckton, and still to some extent discernible, is as follows : — Section at Shapley Heath. Superficial : Flint gravel with a few Lower Greensand fragments (chert and sandstone) ... Upper Bagshot ( 7. Yellow and orange-coloured sand, with scat- or ■; tered flint-pebbles in a band about 1 ft. thick ( at the base f 6. Pebbly Zone : grey sandy clay with more or less irregular seams of flint-pebbles ... about [Near middle of Cutting : — b. Yellow clayey beds with a few green grains ; a ferruginous seam with a few flint-pebbles at the base ... ... 6 ft. a. White ^and with a few seams of grey-clay 8 ft. East end of Cutting : — Whitish laminated clay in yellow sand. In some places the clay predominates ; in others the bed is a whiter sand, with carbon- aceous layers and little or no clay about 20 ft.. Dark bluish clay, throwing out water at the top Dark green sand with numerous concretions of iron pyrites. Fish-teeth, etc. (see below), and casts of shells (Turritella?) Lower f Lamin- J Grey shaley clay, and laminated light- ated | coloured and carbonaceous loams Beds. L Lower Bagshot | " 1. Fine white, much false-bedded sand with clay- pebbles (dug to below rail-level) ... seen for Barton Beds. Feet, to 10 15 Bracklesham Beds (about 55 ft.). Upper Lamin- ated Beds. Beds. ■ 1 2. L 14 to 20 10 12+ 10+J 17 * ' On the main points of Structure and the probable Age of the Bagshot Sands,' &c.,' Quart. Journ. Geol. Soc, vol. iii., p. 383. t H. W. Monckton (with contributions by Clement Reid), Proc. Geol. Assoc, vol. xvi., 1900, pp. 519 to 521. J Prestwich states {Quart. Journ. Geol. Soc, vol. iii.. 1847, p. 383) that these laminated beds are only five feet thick at Shapley Heath. BRACKLESHAM BEDS. 71 '*'* *& 5n eS J> 2= ffl CO _. ffl rf .3 73 a 3 d *H & o s Hi -3« PQ ^< b • O 2 E ffl The following fish - remains, determined by Mr. E. T. Newton, were found in the green-sand bed (3) of this section by members of the Geologists' Association* : — Aetobatis or Myliobatis (probably both), teeth. Cselorhynchus rectus Agass.,fin G-aleocerdo minor Agass., teeth. Lamna vinoenti (Winkl.), teeth. Odontaspis acutissima Agass., tooth. cuspidata Agass., teeth. elegans (Agass.), teeth. macrota (Agass.), teeth. Teleostean vertebra,. The only molluscan remains found were " casts of a spiral shell, probably a Turritella"\ Prestwich, however, records 11 species (6 determined) of mollusca, besides teeth of 3 species of fish, from the Bracklesham Beds of Shapley Heath,| presumably from the same (green) bed. In a brickyard a quarter of a mile south-west of Winchfield Station, grey and brown sandy clay, belonging, apparently, to the ' Upper Laminated Beds ' (5) and ' Dark bluish clay ' (4) of the Shapley-cutting section, are exposed to a depth of about 12 feet. Mr. J. H. Blake was informed that 21 feet of white and yellow sand was found here beneath the clay, in a well 25 feet * H. W. Monckton, Proc. Geol. Assoc, vol. xvi., 1900, p. 521. t Ibid., p. 520. J Quart. Journ. Geol. Soe., vol. iii., 1817, p. 390. The forms recorded are : — Area (very small undescribed species) ; Corbula plicata Bdws. ; C. striata Desh. ; Cytherea (small, undeterminable species) ; Nucula, possibly the similis ; Ostrea fldballula Lam. ; Pecten (smooth species, possibly the corneus) ; Venericardia acuticostata Lam. ; V. elegans Desh. ; V. planioosta Lam. Turritelln, (species not determinable) ; and teeth of Car- charodon megalotis Agas., Lamna elegans Agas., and Otodus obliquus Agas. In the table at the end of his ' List of Fish Teeth from the Bagshot Sands (London Basin),' in Proe. Geol. Assoc, vol. xviii., 1902, pp. 83, 81, A. K. Coomara-swamy, by a slip, credits Prestwich with the record of 8, instead of 3, species of fish from the Brackle- sham Beds of Shapley Heath. 72 EOCENE. deep, but this seems doubtful. Grey and brown sandy clay — prob- ably of the ' Lower Laminated ' group — is dug by the road-side 200 yards south-west of the kiln, and at a lower level by about 20 feet. South-west of the smithy at Crookham the banks of a road sunk in the low river-bluff show a little disturbed grey clay and brown sandy clay with seams of small black flint-pebbles. Brown sand, of Lower Bagshot aspect, is exposed at the bottom of the slope. On the south-eastern side of a disused brickyard, one-third of a mile north-west of the church at Gaily Hill, a small excavation made or enlarged in 1908 showed : — Feet. Soil : black and sandy, containing flint-pebbles 2 f 3. Obscurely-stratified red-brown and grey sand, ! with scattered flint-pebbles in the lower t> w , | part 4 JiracKiesnam , „ Red . browI1) i am i na ted, sandy clay with grey ■ Bects - mottlings 4 I 1. Brown sandy clay (seen in the banks of ponds L occupying the old brick-pits) — These beds seem to be near the top of the formation, and may be correlated with the ' Pebbly Zone ' (6), and the upper part of the ' Upper Laminated Beds ' (5), of the Shapley Heath section (see above, p. 70). The ground on the north side of Gaily Hill village is very sandy, and it is practically certain that the Bracklesham Beds there have a capping of Upper Bagshots.* Some exposures of the sandy beds in this neighbourhood will be noticed in the next chapter (p. 75). * Mr. J. H. Blake suspected the existence of Upper Bagshot Beds here, and even sketched out the boundaries of an outlier of that formation (partly beneath the patch of Plateau Gravel north of the church) on the six-inch field-map (Hants, Sheet 20, slip 3) of the Geological Survey, but ultimately decided to map the ground as Bracklesham Beds. 73 CHAPTER X. UPPER BAGSHOT BEDS. These beds are confined to the north-eastern part of the district, where they underlie the heath-land of Fleet and Hartford Bridge Flats. Their oncoming above the Bracklesham Beds is usually indicated by a distinct rise in the ground. The Upper Bagshot Beds consist almost entirely of yellow and white, slightly-ferruginous sand ; rather loamy, somewhat glau- conitic, and evenly-bedded at the base, but becoming more purely arenaceous and structureless (or only very obscurely stratified) above. A thin bed containing scattered flint-pebbles occurs at the base — probably with the same constancy as in the country to the east and north-east — but its outcrop is difficult to follow where the soil contains much wash from the drift-gravels, as is frequently the case along the borders of the Upper Bagshot outliers in this district.* The Upper Bagshot is the youngest of the solid formations seen in the area of Sheet 284. Here as elsewhere in the London Basin its upper part has been removed by erosion. The lower beds, with a maximum thickness of 40 or 50 feet, alone are represented, and these seldom contain recognisable fossils. At Tunnel Hill near Pirbright, in the adjacent area of Sheet 28o, however, beds about 70 to 80 feet above the pebbly band at the base of the Upper Bagshots have yielded casts of marine mollusca which have a Lower Bartonian facies.f Notes of Exposures. Bright yellow and buff sands, partly glauconitic, are exposed in many places along the indented margin of the Hartford Bridge Flats outlier, but there are few clear sections. Yellow sand, becoming loamy downwards, and underlain by orange-coloured clayey sand with numerous grains of glauconite, is shown in the banks of the road between a quarter and half-a-mile south-east of Eversley Church. A little water is thrown out at the top of the glauconitic bed. The pebble-bed taken as the base of the Upper Bagshots should be visible here, but the writer failed to find it. A dark green sand, probably of Bracklesham age, is exposed in a bank lower down the road.j A little light greyish-green and yellow sand, weathering rusty- brown, shows on the end of the spur west of Yately Heath Wood, and also to the east of Little Minley Farm. * In revising the geological boundaries for Sheet 284, Mr. J. H. Blake appears usually to have drawn the line representing the boundary of the Upper Bagshot Beds a little above the outcrop of this pebble-bed. t J. S. Gardner, H. Keeping, and H. W. Monckton, ' The Upper Eocene, com- prising the Barton and Upper Bagshot Formations,' Quart. Joum. Oeol. Soc, vol. xliv. , 1 888, pp. 578-633. J See also Gardner, Keeping, and, Monckton, op. cit., p. 613. 74 EOCENE. A pit 50 yards south-west of the " Anchor " inn, on the northern edge of this outlier, shows 15 feet of red-brown and greyish glau- conitic sand ; indistinctly stratified in the lower parts, but more loamy and exhibiting a finely-bedded or laminate structure near the top of the section. In this or some neighbouring sand-pit, located as " at the rifle-range," Messrs. Gardner, Keeping, and Monckton noted " yellow, irregularly-bedded sand, becoming nearly white, at the bottom of the pit."* Sir J. Prestwich mentions the occurrence of ferruginous casts of a " small globose species of Cardium " in the Upper Bagshot sands of " Hartford Heath," i.e.', Hartford Bridge Flats.t Messrs. Gardner, Keeping, and Monckton state that at the top of Hazeley Heath, and above a brickyard in Bracklesham clays, " there is a pebble-bed in loose yellow sands beneath and distinct from the gravel which caps the heath." This pebble-bed, they think, is probably the " Upper Bagshot basement-bed," which they have not traced westward of this spot.J The small outlier of Shapley Heath {see p. 70) is not shown on Sheet 284, but the presence of sands resembling those of the Upper Bagshot Beds, in that locality, has long been recognized. In the Memoir on Sheet 12 of the original one-inch map of the Geological Survey, Mr. H. W. Bristow writes§ : — " The white sands of Winchfield House, and on either side of the South-Western Railway cutting, on Shapley Heath, immediately westward of the [Winchfield] station, after a careful examination of the ground and mature consideration, have been included in the Bracklesham series, although they might, at first sight, appear rather to belong to the overlying Upper Bagshot Sands, which make their appearance in the adjoining map (Sheet 8) to the eastward." The sands of Winchfield House are no longer exposed : to judge from the position of the House and its grounds, Bristow probably was right in assigning these beds to the Bracklesham Series. That the greater part of the sand intersected by the adjacent railway-cutting belongs to the same series cannot be doubted, but the present writer agrees with Mr. Monckton in thinking that the highest sand-bed (with a pebbly base) seen on the southern side of this excavation is more consistently referable to the Upper Bagshot Series. A small outlier, consisting of yellow loamy sand, occurs near Palelane Farm, north-west of Fleet. The railway-cutting in the north-western spur of the Fleet out- lier shows 15 to 20 feet of indistinctly-bedded yellow loamy sand. There seems to be about 40 feet of sand in the steep-sided, fir-grown hillocks to the south of the railway here. Between Fleet and Gaily Hill the Upper Bagshot Beds occupy a rather larger area than is shown on Sheet 284. Messrs. Gardner, Keeping, and Monckton record the following section of " Upper * Op. cit., p. 613. f ' On the . . . Structure and the probable Age of the Bagshot Sands, &c., Quart. Journ. Geol. Soc, vol. iii., 1847, p. 393. % Quart. Journ. Geol. Soc, vol. xliv., 1888, p. 613. § ' Geology of parts of Berkshire and Hampshire,' 1862, p. 43. UPPER BAGSHOT BEDS. 75 Bagshot " in a sand-pit on the 300-feet contour about a quarter of a mile north-east of the church at the latter village : — " [4.] Nearly white sand, with a little white clay in very small patches, and numerous green grains , [3. Dark yellow sand, with about as much clay [2.] White and orange-coloured sand. [1.] Feet. 6 4 2 Line of pebbles in yellow sand 1 The beds [3] and [4] contain casts of shells."'-' Mr. Monckton informs the writer that the which probably marks the base of the Upper " clearly in situ," and " has a dip of 7° north " : of bed [1] was visible, in 1886, for a distance or 3^ feet below the pebbles. About 10 feet of orange-coloured sand is exposed in a pit three furlongs east of the church at Grally Hill, and yellow, more or less ferruginous sand can be seen in road-banks around the patch of Plateau Gravel to the north of the village. layer of pebbles, Bagshot Beds, is also that the sand * Quart. Journ. Geol. Soo., vol. xliv. H numbered in descending order. 8, p. 612. In the original text the beds are 76 CHAPTER XL TECTONIC STRUCTURE. DRAINAGE FEATURES. Since the Upper Bagshot Beds were laid down, the local rocks, as a whole, have everywhere suffered much erosion. This erosion has been markedly greater, however, in some parts of the district than in others, for its course has been guided largely by the post- Eocene flexures whose position and character will now be briefly described. Southern Flexures. In the broad upward bend of the strata in the southern and western parts of the area two divergent anticlinal axes are distinguishable, one trending approximately east and west, the other east-south-east to west-north-west (fig. 10). Peasemarsh Anticline. — The more southern of these folds is a continuation of the Peasemarsh disturbance, which brings up the Weald Clay in an inlier to the south of Guildford, and is responsible for the high northward dip of the Chalk in the Hog's Back (Sheet 285). This fold attains its maximum strength in the Guildford-Farnham part of its course. Following approximately the line of the River Wey, by Bentley Green to Froyle, and pitching gently south-westward, it becomes practically a monocline, the southward dip of the Gault in Alice Holt, to the south of the axis, being hardly appreciable, while the dip of the Malmstone (Upper Greensand) and Chalk near Grover's Farm, on the northern limb, attains an angle of 20°, or more (see p. 9). To the south-west of this the fold broadens and rapidly loses in intensity, the decrease in the dips being indicated by the widening of the outcrop-surfaces near Froyle. The northern limb of the fold hereabouts has an irregular, geniculate curvature, roughly rendered in fig. 2, p. 36. West of Froyle the axis enters the Chalk country, where its course, hitherto marked by a valley, is indicated by a line of high ground running through Shalden Green, Herriard, Farleigh Wallop, Kempshott, and near North Waltham to Popham Beacons.* Here the dips are low, but appreciably higher on the northern limb than on the southern, and this tectonic asymmetry is roughly expressed in the form of the Herriard upland. The Peasemarsh anticline is bordered on the south by the ill-defined Binsted and Micheldever syncline,t in which a small outlier of Reading Beds is preserved at East Stratton, three miles south-west of Popham, and in the area of Sheet 300. * The course of this anticline west of Froyle was recognized by P. J. Martin, ' On the Anticlinal Line of the London and Hampshire Basins,' Phil. Maa., ser. 4, vol. ii., 1851, pp. 48 49. C. Barrois (' Reoherches sur le terrain crStaee superieur de l'Angleterre, &c.,' 1876, p. 47) suggests that the fold is continued north-west of Popham in the flexures of Cold Henley and the St. Mary Bourne Valley (Sheet 283). f The axis of this fold probably coincides in part with the line of topographic depression extending north-westward from Alton, by Lasham Hill, Axford, and Preston Candover. P. J. Martin (pp. cit. p. 48), speaks of this depression as a :l well- marked synclinal valley." TECTONIC STRUCTURE. 77 13761 78 TECTONIC STRUCTURE. Kingsclere Anticline. — The more northern anticline is that known as the Kingsclere or Kingsclere-Pewsey fold. Its axis here runs nearly parallel with the main boundary of the Reading Beds, at a distance of half-a-mile to one mile therefrom, between Crondall and Kingsclere, see figs. 2 and 10. The Kingsclere anticline may be said to commence at Crondall, for to the south-east of that place its effects are not clearly dis- tinguishable from those of the adjacent Peasemarsh anti- cline. From Crondall to Chineham, near Basingstoke, the dips vary from 3° to 5° on the northern -limb, and from 1° to 2°, or less, on the southern. In places, as about Mapledurwell, the anticline may pass into a monocline, but the southward dip is clearly distinguish- able between Cron- dall and Greywell, and there are signs of it in the Great Western Railway cutting near Chine- ham. In this part of its course the Kings- clere fold is marked by a slight topogra- phic feature, which commonly takes the form of a steepening of the northward slope of the Chalk country (see fig. 2), but in places that of a round-backed ridge, as in the conspicuous hill of Odiham Firs. West of Chineham the anticline^incveases greatly in strength ; the dips on the northern limb rise to" 1 25°, or more, in the neighbour- hood of Kingsclere (where the arch^of Chalk is breached by the well-known Vale), and the southern limb, still but slightly inclined a 3 -a H a £ . S3 g 'S-i ■*= a o <* ■+= CO ■ FH & '.s * n o .a O H3 TECTONIC STRUCTURE. 79 lengthens dipward, from about two miles near Basingstoke, to about seven miles at the western boundary of the district. The con- comitant westward rise and expansion of the low ridge-feature, just mentioned, into the broad upland tract of the Sydmonton Hills, are well seen from points near Broadmere and Kempshott, on the southern Chalk range. Between the Kingsclere and Peasemarsh anticlines there is an irregular downfold which may be called the Church Oakley syncline. The thick Lower Eocene outlier of Horsedown Common, near Crondall, is situated in it (see figs. 2 and 11), and the east-and- west course of the synclinal axis there is apparent on the map in the relations of the geological boundaries to the contour of 400 feet. Between Horsedown and Hackwood Park its course is uncertain ; but to the west of Hackwood Park its general trend, by Basingstoke Down, Church Oakley, and Steventon, is indicated by that of the strip of Marsupites Chalk which is preserved in the bottom of the fold. Here a topographic trough accompanies the fold, but does not coincide with it exactly, for the line of lowest ground between Basingstoke and Ashe keeps well to the north of the synclinal axis. Northern Flexures. In the main Tertiary area the relation of the geological boundaries to the contours affords some evidence of the existence of further flexures, with a dominant south-east to north-west trend (fig. 10). So far as the Basingstoke district is concerned, the lowest point in the London-Basin downfold is situated in the neighbourhood of Fleet, and there are indications of a shallow syncline running thence north-westward by Hartley Row, Hazeley, and south of Heckfield Heath. A second ill-defined trough, approximately parallel with the first, occurs under Hartford Bridge Flats, and is traceable into the area of the Reading sheet (268) of the map ; and there are suggestions of a third, with a more westward trend, passing through Shapley Heath.* In the country bordering the River Loddon the only tectonic feature clearly discernible is a prevailing northward dip, well shown in the decline of the base of the Lower Bagshot Beds from Newnham to Turgis Green. The shallow trough which runs through Bramley, Pamber Green, and Baughurst, to the west of the Loddon Valley, may be a con- tinuation of the Fleet syncline. The age of the fold-system to which the above-described flexures belong is discussed by Dr. A. Strahan in the Survey Memoir on the Isle of Purbeck and Weymouth, 1898, pp. 212 et seq. * The first and second of these slight flexures appear to correspond roughly with the Woburn-Chobham-Albert Asylum and Pirbright troughs shown on the sketch- map illustrating H. G. Lyons's ' Notes on the Bagshot Beds and their Stratigraphy,' Quart. Journ. Geol.Soc, vol. xlv., 1889, pp. 633-639, pi. xxi. Lyons suggests (pp. 635, 636) that his Swinley (and Windsor Castle?) anticline passes, south westward, through Hazeley and Shapley Heaths, but this seems not to be the case. It appears to bear round to the west near Sandhurst (Sheet 269\ and to take on a north-westward trend in the Beading district (Sheet 268). There is » noteworthy constriction of the roughly east-and-west post-Eocene flexures near the meridian of Farnham. 12761 F 2 80 DRAINAGE FEATURES. Drainage Features. General Character.— The relation of streams to structures is, on the whole, a fairly close one in this part of the country. On the Chalk, a large proportion of the streams and dry valleys follow the tectonic slopes, by which their direction has doubtless been determined. Few of these dip-slope streams occupy definite construc- tional troughs, however. In the western part of the district the Church Oakley syncline is marked, though but roughly, by the topographic depression in which the headwaters of the Loddon and the Test are situated ; but farther east it is expressed merely by a flattening of the general northward slope from the crest of the Hefriard range, and has little influence upon the drainage. In the Tertiary tract the northward course of the rivers which rise in the Chalk is at first in harmony with the prevailing dip of the strata, but becomes discordant therewith near the northern limit of the district, where the ill-defined axis of the London-Basin syncline is reached. It seems as if the course of the Loddon had been marked out on a northward-sloping surface which truncated some of the tectonic structures described above. Vale of Kingsclere. — Though little more than one square mile in area, the portion of the Vale of Kingsclere represented on Sheet 284 displays some features of interest in the present connection. (See fig. 12.) Like the Vale of Ham, whose development is briefly discussed by the writer in the Explanation of Sheet 267,* the Kingsclere Vale appears to have been formed, to a large extent, by the expansion of the heads of combes trenching the rocks on the northern limb of the Kingsclere anticline. Part of the excavated material was carried southward to the Eiver Test, by combes developed on the less-inclined southern limb of the anticline, but of these southern outlets only one — namely, the valley followed by the railway south of Burghclere, Sheet 283 — was cut so deeply as to form a well-marked breach in the Chalk downs on the south side of the Vale. The integration of the drainage of the Kingsclere Vale is far from being completed, for there are still four gaps by which the surface-water escapes, or can escape, through the ridge of tilted chalk on the north. Three of these lie outside the limits of the Basingstoke district :| the position of the fourth and easternmost is indicated on Sheet 284 by the re-entrant angle in the boundary of the Upper Chalk to the west of Wolverton Rectory. The small interior drainage-basin whose slopes converge towards this gap is bounded on the east by the Chalk escarpment enclosing the Vale, but is limited on the opposite side by a transverse ridge which has the appearance of a low swell when viewed from the east, but presents a rather marked bluff to the west. As the Middle- Chalk floor of this basin stands appreciably higher above sea-level * pp. 79, 80. See alao W. Buckland ' On tlie Formation of the Valley of Kinasolere, &o.,' Trans. Qeol. Soc, ser. 2, vol. ii., 1826, p. 119. | See Jukes-Browne, ' The Geology of the Country around Andover ' (Mem. Geal. Survey'), 1908, p. 5. DRAINAGE FEATURES. 81 than the adjacent Lower Chalk and Selbornian country, which is drained by the more deeply-cut gap at Kingsclere village farther west, the basin itself is liable to loss of area through the encroach- ment of combes growing back from the lower ground on its western side ; and in the details of the local topography a rather striking indication of such loss is to be seen (fig. 12). Fig. 12. — Diagrammatic View of the Vale of Kingsclere, from a point near Plantation Farm on the eastern Chalk Escarpment, looking west, (h.j.o.w.) uurnu (Tipper Greenland. Kingsclere. Gap fin. Chalk ridffc) a. Middle Chalk floor of drainage-basin connected with the Wolverton Rectory gap, which is out of sight on the right-hand side of sketch, b b. Low ridge marking the western limit of this basin, c. Combe encroaching on the basin from the lower ground drained by the Kingsclere gap. The Chalk-pit to the right of the road in the foreground shows the section described at pp. '22, 23. A small trough-like combe, whose sharp outlines, where it traverses the low ridge at the western side of the basin, are in marked contrast with the subdued contours of the ground in which it is cut, has been developed along the foot of the escarpment on the south side of the Vale, in such a way as to divert most of the drainage of that slope, from its original course towards the Wolver- ton-Rectory gap, to the more distant breach at Kingsclere. In the natural course of events the brock which escapes at Kingsclere will acquit e all the surface-drainage of the eastern part of the Vale. Valleys near Hannington.—Qw'mg to the decrease in the strength of the Kingsclere fold east of Wolverton, the agents of erosion have not yet succeeded in opening a well-marked vale of the Kingsclere type on its axis between Wolverton and Crondall, but the beginnings of such a feature are recognisable in the arrange- ment of the combes in the little valley-system on the slope to the north of Hannington and Upper Wooton. Although this system is cut in the Upper Chalk only, the strikeward element in it is already pronounced.* Possibly the direction is determined by some line of weakness due to tectonic causes. * The ' anticlinal ' character of the combe which runs from the cross-roads east of Plantation Farm to Pittlane Farm, near Ewhurst, was recognised by P. J. Martin, rhil. Mag. ser. 4, vol. ii., 1851, p. i9. 82 DRAINAGE FEATURES. Wey Valley.— The predilection shown by the Farnham branch of the River Wey for following the outcrops of the softer strata suggests that it has eaten its way back along those outcrops,* decapitating such earlier streams as may have followed the constructional slopes and troughs. Signs of encroachment of "this kind are to be seen near Alton, but in the neighbourhood of Bentley the evidences of decapitation and reversal of the dip- slope drainage are less distinct. The gaps in the Chalk range to the north of the Wey are shallow, and in only one instance, namely, that of an oblique notch near the south-eastern end of Clare Park, is there clear indication of the former presence of a stream. Here a ridge, composed of Reading Beds, and situated a little to the west of the lowest point in the gap, is capped (at 425 feet O.D.) by a small patch of stratified gravel, which is remarkable for the large proportion of Lower Greensand (Hythe Beds) chert it contains. But it is doubtful if this gravel was deposited by a transverse stream. The present writer is inclined to think, that it was laid down, together with the similar gravels on the Chalk and Malmstone ridges to the south of this gap, by a wandering longitudinal or strike-ward stream, which may be identified with the Farnham Wey. The arguments, however, rest largely upon the interpretation of phenomena presented in the country outside the limits of the Basingstoke district, and cannot be developed with propriety in the present memoir. * The ' subsequent ' origin of the Farnham Wey has lately been questioned by H. Bury, Quart. Journ. Geol. Soc, vol. lxiv., 1908, p. 318. The problem of the Wealden drainage is discussed by C. le Neve Foster and W. Topley in their paper ' On the Superficial Deposits of the Valley of the Medway, &c.', Quart. Journ. Geol. Soc, vol. xxi., 1865, p. 443, and in the following Memoirs of the Geological Survey. : ' The Geology of the Isle of Wight,' 2nd Ed. (1889), by C. Reid and A. Strahan. ' The Geology of the Isle of Purbeck and Weymouth ' (1898), by A. Strahan. 83 CHAPTER XII. CLAY-WITH-FLIN TS. In many places, and especially on the upland ridges in the southern part of the district, the light stony soil or ' hazel loam ', which covers most of the outcrop-surface of the Chalk, passes into a more clayey deposit, known as Clay-with-Flints. This consists, in large measure, of unstratified, dark red-brown, slightly arenaceous, stiff clay, mixed with stones among which unworn, bleached fragments of flint-nodules are by far the most conspicuous. Entire nodules of flint, together with pebbles and subangular pieces of the same material, are constant but subordinate constituents ; and small pebbles of white quartz, and bits of compact iron-sandstone, occur as local accessories. Frequently, however, the reddish clay is replaced by brown loam, in which the stones are, as a rule, less abundant, and tend to occur in irregular layei-3. The proportion of stones to finer material is exceedingly variable. In some places the clay and loam so far preponderate as to have allowed of the drift being worked for brick-making ; in others— and chiefly where the ground has a distinct slope — the stones are so closely packed that it can be dug for gravel. Here and there the more loamy deposits contain ill-defined masses of bright-red or red-mottled clay, which, at a distance, much resembles that of the Reading Beds, but is distinguished therefrom by the presence of angular flints (often blackened or bearing black dendritic markings), and of irregular seams and bodies of sand and flint-grit. The boundaries of the Clay-with-Flints are seldom marked by a topographic feature, and have a vagueness which cannot be adequately suggested on the map. The variations in its thickness depend less on the minor inequalities of the surface of the ground than on those in the top of the underlying Chalk, which is usually much indented by the solution-hollows termed ' pipes '. In whatever form it occurs, the Clay-with-Flints is more or less patently a mixture of the least soluble constituents of the Chalk and the waste of Eocene strata. Mr. Jukes-Browne has lately suggested that "the surface on which the tracts of Clay-with-Flints lie [in this and adjacent areas] is practically a prolongation of the basal Eocene plane "*,but detailed comparison of the field-relations of the Clay-with-Flints and of the Reading Beds to the Chalk shows that this can seldom be the case* The Reading Series and the Clay-with-Flints are both uncon- formable to the Chalk, but their unconf ormability is not of the same type. Not only does the Clay-with-Flints habitually overstep the zonal sub-divisions of the Chalk with greater rapidity than do the Reading Beds, and overstep those sub-divisions, moreover, as often as not, in a direction more or less opposed to that of the Lower Eocene transgression, but it also commonly occurs on erosion-surfaces which abruptly truncate flexures of post-Eocene date.* While it is almost certain that the Clay-with-Flints comprises deposits of widely diverse ages and origins, it is still not unlikely * ' The Clay-with-Flints : its Origin and Distribution ', Quart. Jown. Geol. Soc. vol. lxii., 1906, pp. 145, 149. 84 SUPERFICIAL DEPOSITS. that a great part of this drift is, as Mr. Jukes-Browne believes, " the result of a special set of processes which were in operation during late Pliocene and early Pleistocene [Glacial] times."* For a discussion of this difficult subject the reader is referred to Mr. Jukes-Browne's suggestive paper. Notes of Exposures. Clay-with-Flints, of a red-brown tint and in places very stony, is well developed on the higher parts of the Sydmonton Hills between Hannington and Upper Wootton. At the former village it is exposed in the sides of the deep pond by the church, and in road-banks near the smithy. A small chalk-pit, about a quarter of a mile north-north-east of the church, shows part of a pipe, filled with mottled clay and small pebbles from the Reading Beds, mixed with black and white chips of flint. Stony clay occurs in a road-bank on the eastern side of Plantation Farm, and an unmapped but thick mass of brown clay and loam, containing scattered flints, mantles the chalk-slopes and obscures the boundary of the Reading Beds near Wolverton Rectory. In a pit about 300 yards west of Upper Wootton, and on the north side of the road to Ibworth, Mr. C. B. Hawkins noted six feet of sandy clay with small flints. Bright-red, stiff clay with large angular flints is seen in the road-banks and in the fields east of Upper Wootton. Here the drift comes on with a slight feature, and is coloured as Reading Beds on Sheet 12 of the old one-inch Survey Map. The deposits about Hannington and Upper Wootton, however, probably lie between 100 and 200 feet below the base of the Eocene Beds which formerly covered this part of the country. The small spreads of flinty clay and loam on the lower part of the southern slope of the Sydmonton range all appear to be thin. Mr. C. E. Hawkins noticed traces of mottled clay west of Wortingwood Farm, and a few green-coated flints in the patch to the north of Worting House. Brown sandy clay containing much water-worn gravel covers the spur to the west of Ashe, and can be seen in the banks of the high-road to Andover. In a pit at the old brickyard 200 yards north of Berrydown Farm (at the western edge of the district), Mr. F. J. Bennett saw (about 1889) stiff brown loam, with irregular seams of small flint-pebbles at the base, resting on brown clay containing aggregations of large, little-worn flints ; the height of the section being about 1 2 feet. He was told that the well at the farmf passed through 40 feet of clay (probably in a pipe) before reaching chalk. At Popham, a mass of reconstructed Reading clay and loam, with patches of sand, occurs in the bottom of a shallow depression in the summit of the southern range of Chalk downs, and is poorly exposed in the high banks of the pond east of Manor Farm, and in old brickyard-pits north of the pond. On the rising ground west of Popham small, unworn and partly-worn flints occur thickly in a clayey matrix. Around Moundsmere the Clay-with-Flints is very stony, but at Bradley Bill brown loam, with relatively few flints, is indicated in the disused brickyard west of Down Wood. Mr. Hawkins was informed that 12 to 14 feet of clay and loam with flints had been found above the Chalk in temporary excavations at Burkham. There are many exposures in the big spread on the ridges about Farleigh Wallop and Herriard, but only a few of these need be noticed here. In the lately-abandoned brickyard at Broadmere, north-west of Farleigh Wallop, a pit shows the following beds : — Soil : clayey, thin. Feet, f 2. Red-brown, stiff sandy clay with stones (viz., white, black, and green-coated flints, in all stages of wear, and very small quartz- pebbles) disposed in irregular seams and witl>Flints "* pockets, and most numerous near the base, to 10 resting unevenly on, , Dark orange-yellow and red-brown slightly sandy clay, with inclusions of loam, but with few stones ... ... seen for 5 * Op. cit. p. 161. t Not " the brickyard," as stated in the Memoir on Sheet 283, p. 54. Clay- CLAY-WITH-FLINTS. g<5 Smali spheroidal concretions (to £ inch diameter) of red and black iron-ore occur throughout the deposit. Slickensided surfaces are common, these and the joint surfaces being usually stained black. Small, imperfectly-rounded, green- coated pebbles, of the Reading Bottom-bed type, are abundant at the base of bed (1). The prevalence of old chalk-wells on the ridges about Ellisfield and Farleigh Wallop* indicate that the Chalk thereabouts is thickly covered by superficial deposits. The cuttings on the Basingstoke and Alton Light Railway, between "Winslade and Lasham Hill, well display the variable nature of the Clay-with-Flints and the irregular character of its junction with the Chalk. In the cutting east of Fryingdown Copse, Mr. C. E. Hawkins noted thicknesses of between 4 and 20 feet of clay and loam, sometimes mottled. He ascertained that 18 feet of the deposit had been proved in a well at Herriard Station ; also that chalk was not reached at a depth of 20 feet from the surface in an excavation for a tank at Manor Farm, south-west of Herriard Church. At Herriard Brickworks, three furlongs south of Hale Farm, there are over- grown pits from 5 to 10 feet deep in brown sandy loam ; and a more clayey drift, in places very stony and probably of considerable thickness, gives root- hold for the oaks of Weston Common. The patches of Clay-with-Flints which occur on the slope to the north of the high ground of Herriard and Weston Common are mostly thin. At Upper Nately an unmapped mass of brown loam, with unworn and pebbly flints, over- spreads the Reading Beds, and is shown in the pits to the west of the church {see p. 45). On the high ground in the south-eastern parts of the district, bright-red stiff clay, with bleached flints, is exposed in the pond- and road-banks south-east of the " Golden Pot " inn, and the same kind of drift covers the Upper Chalk around Tarnham's Farm. Deposits of a more loamy character occur on the Middle Chalk in the spurs west and north of Lower Froyle, and to the north of Bentley. Between Well and Sheephouse .Copse a flinty loam, unmapped though in places of considerable thickness, covers the Chalk, and overlaps the boundary of the Reading Beds. In Well Lane, at the eastern edge of Sheephouse Copse, pits at, and a little north-east of, the cross-ways show 6 to 8 feet of coarse gravel, consisting mainly of unworn nodular and broken flints (to 1 foot in diameter), with flint-pebbles and small quartz-pebbles, in a scanty matrix which in some places is a mottled red and brown, stiff, sandy clay, and in others a fine yellow sand. The deposit shows signs of a rough bedding parallel with the sloping surface of the ground. There is a good deal of red-brown coarse sand, with very small quartz-pebbles, mixed with the clay in the spread south-east of Well, and the road-banks west of the cross-roads by Glade Farm show J. to 3 feet of loose loamy flintrgravel containing similar sand and pebbles. Between the Lower Eocene outlier of Horsedown Common, south-west of Crondall, and the boundary of the main mass of the Reading Beds, near Great and Little Kye Farms, there are thin spreads of loam with unworn flints' and a sprinkling of green-coated flint- pebbles. A more clayey drift occurs in the ridges about Long Sutton, and is exposed at the pond by the church in that village. Unlike the Reading Beds of Well and Horsedown Common, which rest upon a thin group of beds near the top of the Marsupites Zone of the Chalk, the Clay- with-Flints in this part of the district comes in contact with most of the divisions of the Upper and Middle Chalk, and on the crest of the Chalk ridge south of Well probably does not approach to within 100 feet of the surface on which the Reading Series was laid down.f * Noted by C. E. Hawkins. t Cf. A. J. Jukes-Browne, Quart. Jouni. Geol. Soc,, vol. lxii., 1908, pp. 154, 155. CHAPTER XIII. PLATEAU GEAVEL. The superficial deposits which are mapped as PJateau Gravel on Sheet 284 are restricted to the areas of the Eocene and Selbornian Bocks,* and have their chief development in the sandy country around Hartford Bridge, in the north-eastern part of the district. They occur typically at the summits of flat-topped ridges and hills, though some are situated well within the intervening valleys. In altitude they range from about 220 to 500 feet above Ordnance Datum, and from 20 to 300 feet above the principal streams in their vicinity. Many of the small, low-lying patches on the sides of the valleys are merely washes of stones and sand from the wasting edges of the sheets on higher ground ; others, however, form or cover more or less distinct terraces, which serve as connecting links between the gravels on the hills and those bordering the streams. The composition of the Plateau Gravels varies with the locality. To the west of the River Loddon they consist chiefly of water-worn Chalk-flints, together with a variable percentage of flint-pebbles, bits of iron-sandstone, incompletely-rounded pebbles and larger sub- angular or angular blocks of sarsen or greywether sandstone, and small pebbles of opaque, white quartz. The matrix is usually sandy, but not infrequently distinctly argillaceous. The deposits to the east of the River Whitewater, as well as those of Alice Holt on the south side of the Wey, contain all the above-mentioned materials, with the important addition of Lower Greensand (Hythe Beds) chert and cherty-sandstone, in more or less worn, flat-sided pieces. Of the Plateau Gravels between' the Loddon and the Whitewater, a few (chiefly the more, northern) are of the chert-bearing type ; the remainder are of the chertless type found to the west of the Loddon. The lower portions of the thicker masses of this gravel frequently possess stratified and current-bedded structures, which may, in most cases, be safely attributed to deposition in running water. On the other hand, the thinner spreads, and the superficial portions of the thicker also, commonly present a confused or contorted appearance — in some instances evidently due to the burrowing of tree-roots, but in others more suggestive of the disturbing effect of changes of temperature (accompanied by freezing and melting of ground- water), of the washing-out of the sandy matrix of the stones, and, in the case of the bolder contortions, of some forcible thrust, directed horizontally, or obliquely from above. Whether these contortions are due to ice-action or to soil-creep is uncertain. In the latter case, not less than in the foimer, they seem to have required for their development climatic conditions different from those which prevail at present. * By an error in the printing, a small patch of Clay-with-Flints S.W. of Ibworth hae been coloured as Plateau Gravel. PLATEAU GRAVEL, S7 On the fluviatile theory of the origin of the Plateau Gravels, the even tops of the ridges and hills capped by the larger sheets are taken to he the remnants of old alluvial flats or flood-plains, developed during pauses in the downward displacement of the local limit of subaerial degradation. The relations of the principal deposits of the Basingstoke district to one another, and to the existing and former lines of drainage, will be briefly considered in the latter portion of this chapter, after the deposits themselves have been described. West of the Rioer Loddon. — A wash of loamy flint gravel, nowhere of sufficient thickness to be mappable, overspreads the Lower Bagshot outliers of Great Knowl Hill and Wolverton Wood, near Kingsclere. Thicker deposits of a generally similar character occur on the summits of the' low hills of Bracklesham Beds at Tadley (334 feet), Baughurst (372 feet) Tadley Place Farm (330-385 feet), and Little London (270-280 feet), while smaller patches are found on Lower Bagshot terrain about Ramsdell (330-340' feet), and Pamber End (260-300 feet). In most of these places the gravel has been dug, but seldom to more than two or three feet in depth. Between the Loddon and the Whitewater. — At Hook Common (300-320 feet) a thin spread of gravel, composed of bleached flint- pebbles and subangular flints in loam and loamy sand, rests unevenly on London Clay. Thin flint gravel occurs on the top of the ridge (280-310 feet) of Lower Bagshot Beds between Tylney Hall and Turgis Green. The abundance, of flint- pebbles in the northernmost patch, and in that at Lyde Green, suggests the former existence of an Eocene pebble-bed in this neighbourhood. The gravels thus far noticed appear to be destitute of Lower-Greensand debris. . At Heckfield Heath the gravel caps a well-marked plateau, the top of which is almost level, at 270 feet O.D., north of Heckfield, but falls away gently, to about 260'feet, in a northward and a south-eastward direction. In that part of this spread which is represented on Sheet 284 the gravel is dug, to depths of 2 to 7 feet, 'in pits a quarter of a mile north and north-east of Heckfield Smithy, and half a mile north-west of Heckfield Place. It is sandy, in part well-stratified, and is composed chiefly of subangular flints, but Hythe-Beds chert and cherty-sandstone are common constituents. Between the Whitewater and the Hart. — At Hazeley Heath there are two small plateaux of Bracklesham Beds thickly covered by a sandy gravel containing much chert. Thin patches of the drift, mapped partly as Plateau and partly as Valley Gravel, occur on the slopes below the larger masses, which have a gentle inclination to the north-west. In the north-western plateau ' (275-285 feet) the gravel is worked' to a depth of 5 or 6 feet in a pit on the north-eastern side of the main road across the heath. The larger, south-eastern, flat (285-289 feet) is the site of the most extensive gravel- workings in the Basingstoke district, and many good sections are to be seen there. The gravel is much contorted in its upper parts.* A spread of ochreous flint gravel rests on the Bracklesham Beds north" of Chatter Alley (220-245 feet), and is dug in shallow pits a quarter of a mile south of the Workhouse. The northern parts of this deposit are only 20 to 30 feet above the- local-level of the River Hart, and are covered by a fine loam like that of the modern alluvium. * See- H. W. Monckton, ' Cycling Excursion from Winchfield to Wokingham,' Proo. Geol. Astoc, vol. xvi., 1899, p. 153. 88 SUPERFICIAL DEPOSITS. , At Shapley Heath (310-319 feet) a small but rather thick deposit of yellow sandy gravel, containing pieces of chert and cherty-sandstone, caps the little (unmapped) outlier of Upper Bagshot Beds noticed above (p. 74). There are small exposures at the top of the railway-cutting (south side), and in the banks of the road by the western bridge over the railway. Parts of the gravel are cemented by iron-oxide. It may be mentioned here that similar ferruginous pudding-stones, known as 'ferrells' or 'verrells,' occur throughout the northern part of the Basingstoke area, and are occasionally to be seen in the , Chalk country to the south. Chert occurs in a thin capping of gravel on the little outlier of Lower Bagshot Beds at Odiham Common. East of the River Hart. — The principal spread of Plateau Gravel is that which occurs on the broad plateau of Hartford Bridge Flats and Eversley Upper Common (305-332 feet). The surface of this typical plateau slopes westwards at rather less that 10 feet per mile, and has a slight transverse convexity. Of the many pits in it, most are shallow and exhibit only the upper part of the gravel, which, where it shows signs of bedding, is " frequently much contorted, masses of the [associated] sand running into it in a most fantastic manner to 6 or 7 feet from the surface of the ground."* The lower parts, however, in all the deeper pits seen by the present writer, are distinctly stratified, and exhibit the phenomenon of current-bedding in great perfection. TJnstratifie^l, sandy and loamy gravel is shown in pits, 4 to 7 feet deep, about three furlongs south of (the site of) Cooper's Farm, and in others a little to the south of the point where six roads meet, one mile north-east of Hartford Bridge. The gravel worked in the latter group of excavations is markedly bleached, and when viewed from a short distance, between the trunks of the surrounding firs, might easily be mistaken for chalk. Better sections occur on the eastern part of the plateau, near the boundary of the> district dealt with in this memoir. One of these, in a working situated about a quarter of a mile south of the " Anchor " inn, shows : — Soil : thin and stony. Feet. ' 2. Mottled red-brown and yellow loamy gravel, containing masses of brown sand, and Plateau GraveH arranged in irregular contorted bands ... 5 passing down into — ■ I. Interstratified sandy gravel and brown sand, with strongly- marked current-bedding, seen for 5 In another and larger working, near the southern edge of the plateau, and about a quarter of a mile north-north-east of Little Minley Farm, the succession is (fig. 13) :— Soil : black, sandy and stony. Feet. f 3. Bleached stones in contorted bands of brown sand and loam to 4 I which pass down into — Plateau Gravel J 2- Rust y- D rown laminated and current-bedded sand with seams of fine gravel to 5 ; (Base even and sharply defined). | 1. Evenly-stratified and current-bedded gravel L with partings and lenses of brown sand, seen for 6 A smaller but equally clear section, closely resembling the last, is shown in a pit on the south side of the London road, south-west of milestone 34 and at the edge of a plantation^ In both this and the preceding section the lower beds have a prevailing gentle inclination to the south. * H. W. Monokton, ' On the Gravels South of the Thames. &c ' Quart. Journ. Geol. Soc, vol. xlvm., 1892, p. 36. t The writer found a sub-angular piece of white vein-quartz, measuring 2J inches in longest diameter, in the lower part of the gravel here. . PLATEAU GRAVEL. 89 Fig. 13. — Plateau Gravel, Hartford Bridge Flats, (h.j.o.w.) Scale : 1 inch = 12 feet. All these sections (and others not mentioned) well display the 3 '•>£:^S^§^^!^^^^^S:^^' difference in the structure of the upper and lower layers of the, gravel on the Hartford Bridge Flats. The relations of the two are such as to make it highly probable that the upper, contorted part was originally as evenly or distinctly stratified as the layers below. The horizontal element in the movement which is implied by the contortions seems to have varied in its direction from point to point. The deposits on sloping ground south and east of Brams Hill (240-270 feet) are thin and loamy, and appear to be, for the most part, only washes from the higher spread of Hartford Bridge Flats. The low-lying patches (210-230 feet) at and around Litchett's Plain, to the south of the Flats, also appear to be accumulations of slope-wash. They would have been better mapped as Valley Gravel. A more sandy gravel, with less chert, occurs in thin spreads on the Upper Bagshots at Fleet (260-270 feet) ; also to the east and south-east of Dinorben Court, and on the western spur of Beacon (or Hungry) Hill (500 feet), east of Bedlands, near Crondall. The deposits on Beacon Hill contain very little chert, and in this respect form a marked contrast to the gravels which remain to be described. Near the south-eastern end of Clare Park a low ridge of Beading Beds is capped by sandy gravel, at 420 to 425 feet O.D. A pit on the west side of the lane leading to Doras Green shows 3 feet of horizontally-bedded gravel, of fine to medium texture and containing thin seams of brown sand, beneath li. feet of brown stony loam and soil. Between 40 and 50 per cent, of the stones in this drift are composed of chert and cherty-sandstone of the Hythe- Bed type, the other coarse constituents being sub-angular flints (to 6 inches diam.), flint-pebbles, and small pebbles of white quartz. A similar gravel, somewhat coarser and containing about 30 per cent. o£ Hythe Beds material and a few small blocks of compact grey sarsen, occurs on the jidges of Chalk and Malmstone farther south (390 to 420 feet).* South of the River Wei/. — Gravel consisting chiefly of sub- angular flints and of cherts and cherty sandstone occurs on the Gault on the higher part of the Alice Holt plateau (360-418 feet). The deposits in Lodge Jnclosure (above 400 feet) are sandy, but in* those to the east, at lower levels, the stones are mixed with loam and clay. Most of the gravel hereabouts seems to be thin. Age and Relations. — If the gravels described above are indeed mainly of fluviatile origin, it is evident, from the difference in altitude of adjacent spreads, that physiographic changes of considerable magnitude took place during the formation of the Plateau Gravel deposits as a whole, and hence that these deposits are of various agesj ; but it is not easy to determine their mutual relations in time. The broad spread of Hartford Bridge Flats, which stands about 150 feet above the River Blackwater, and slopes gently westward * The deposits of high-level gravel between Clare Park and Grover's Farm are miscoloured as Valley Gravel on the colour-printed issue of Sheet 284 (1905). t Cf. remarks on the Plateau Gravel of the Isle of Wight in ' The Geology of the- Isle of Wight ' (Mem. Geol. Survey), 2nd ed. 1889, p. 210. 90 SUPEKFICIAL DEPOSITS. at a slightly lower gradient than that stream, probably belongs to what in other parts of the Kennet-Thames basin has been termed the ' Silchester Stage.'* The small deposits on the hills of Tadley, Tadley Place Farm, atid Baughurst, and the thin drift of Great Knowl Hill and Wolverton farther west, also may belong to this stage, for they bear the same relation to the gravel-sheet of Silchester Common, as the inclined drift-spreads of Inkpen and Burghclere Commons do to the Greenham-Common gravel, near Newbury,! and, like these, seem to date from the time when the Kennet basin was shallower by 150 to 160 feet than at present. To judge from their less elevation (100 to 135 feet) above the larger local streams, the gravels of Hazeley and Heckfield Heaths are newer than those of Hartford Bridge Flats, but neither the former nor the Rotherwick and Shapley Heath gravels, which may be of about their age, appear to be referable to any well-marked drift-stage of the Kennet-Thames basin. Distribution of the Lower Greensand Cherts.— The high-level gravels in the country covered by Sheet 284 were, explicitly or implicitly, included by Sir Joseph Prestwich in his " Southern Drift,"J and most of the gravels to the east of the Loddon bear evidence of their southern derivation in the presence of chert-stones from the Hythe Beds of the Weald area. It would be out of place in this Memoir to recapitulate the reasons which exist for regarding the wide gap in the Chalk ridge at the head of the Blackwater Valley, near Farnham, as the principal channel whereby this material was carried into the Loddon basin : it will here be stated merely that there are good grounds -for the belief that the River Blackwater formerly collected the drainage of a tract of Lower Greensand country now within the catchment area of the River Wey.§ The principal spreads of chert-bearing Plateau Gravel in the basin of the Loddon occur on either side of the Blackwater, and it is to this stream, in some earlier stage or stages of its existence, that Mr. H. W. Monckton ascribes the Eormation of the deposits of Hartford Bridge Flats, Hazeley Heath, and Heckfield Heath.|| This view is shared by the present writer, except as regards the Hazeley Heath gravels, which seem, from their position, to belong rather to the Hart drainage, and may have obtained their Lower Greensand debris, at second hand, from a former southward extension of the higher deposit of Hartford Bridge Flats. * H. J. O. White, ' On a, Peculiarity in the Course of certain Streams in the London and Hampshire Basins,' Proc. Geol. Assoc, vol. xvii., 1902, p. 406. t See White, 'Geology of the country around Hungerford and Newbury' (Mem. Geol. Survey), 1907, pp. 85-95. J Quart. Journ. Geol. Soc, vol. xlvi., 1890, pp. 161, 162. § See, especially, F. C. J. Spurrell, ' A Sketch of the History of the Rivers and Denudation of West Kent, &c.' Greenwich, 1886, p. 14; H. W. Monckton, 'On some Gravels of the Bagshot District,' Quart. Journ. Geol. Soc, vol. liv , 1898. pp. 191, 192; H. J. Mackinder, 'Britain and the British Seas,' Heinemann, London, 1902, pp. 116, 117, and H. Bury, ' Notes on the River Wey ,' Quart. Journ. Geol. Sue., vol. lxiv., 1908, pp. 318-383. || ' On the Gravels South of the Thames, &3.', Quart. Journ. Geol. Soc, vol. xlviii., 1892, p. 37, and in J. H. Blake's ' Excursion to Silchester,' Proc Geol. Assoc. vol. xvi., 1900, p. 515. PLATEAU GKAVEL. 91 The former existence of another channel by which Lower Green- sand debris may have entered the Loddon basin is suggested by the cherty gravel on the water-parting of the Wey and Loddon (Hart Branch) to the south-east of Clare Park, mentioned on pp. 82, 89. As, the lowest point of the water-parting here is about 140 feet above the level of the Farnham Wey to the south — and the gravel in question is 50 feet higher — it is evident, that the connection, if it ever existed, has long been broken.* .. Westward of Clare Park the writer could find no chert in the superficial deposits on the crest of the Chalk ridge, and, in his opinion, the likelihood of a stream bearing this material ever having flowed through the gap at the " Golden Pot "t is a remote one. To account for the occurrence of chert in the present drainage-area of the River Whitewater, recourse to the hypothesis of a former direct, and independent, stream-connection between that area and the Weald seems unnecessary ; for the Plateau Gravels, f egarded as old fluviatile deposits, so clearly witness the mutability of the lines of drainage in the country occupied by the soft Eocene strata, that little hesitation need be felt in crediting the streams which were responsible for the older deposits in the basin of the modern River Hart with the transportation of Lower Greensand detritus to points as far west as Odiham Common and Shapley Heath. * In the deeper gap at the head of the Blackwater Valley, by Farnham, the water- parting is, in places, barely 50 ft. above the local level of the Wey. t The possibility of this is considered by H. Bury in his ' Notes on the River Wey,', Quart. Journ. Geol. Soc, vol. lxiv., 1908, p. 330. 92 CHAPTER XIV. VALLEY GRAVEL AND SAND. BRICKEARTH. Valley Gravel. This deposit occurs in narrow strips following the bottoms of the principal combes in the Chalk, and in broader sheets on the floors and lower side-slopes of the more open valleys worn in the Eocene and Selborniau rocks. Distinct terraces occur in the Wey Valley, but are scarce elsewhere, the majority of the deposits forming gently- sloping sheets, bounded by no definite features. They consist generally of the less destructible components of such rocks as are exposed in their vicinity, or in the higher parts of the valleys in which they are situated ; but in the north-eastern and south- eastern portions of the district chert-stones and other debris of non- local solid strata appear ; and of these exotic materials, the Plateau Gravels seem to have been the chief source. The main coarse constituent of the Valley Gravel is more or less water-worn flint. Quartz-sand and flint-grit, together with a variable proportion of ochreous and argillaceous sediment, form the matrix, and occur in impersistent bands. These finer ingre- dients constitute the " Sand " mentioned in the legend of Sheet 284 and- in the title of the present chapter. In the Chalk country the lower parts of the gravel contain much chalk-rubble. Stratifica- tion is much less apparent than in the Plateau gravel, but this, perhaps, is accounted for by the smaller depth of the excavations. Palaeolithic implements are said to have been found in the Loddon gravels,* and remains of mammoth have been definitely recorded from those of the Farnham Wey {see p. 93). The principal deposits may be conveniently noticed under the headings of the river-basins within which they lie. The southern developments will first be dealt with. Test Basin. — Gravel occurs in considerable thickness in the valleys which unite between Deane and Ashe, a little above the spot marked as the source of the River Test. In the bottom south-west of Malshanger House there are large diggings, 6 to 7 feet deep, in coarse flint gravel containing small blocks of sarsen. Loamy gravel has been worked at the cross-roads south of Ashe, near the level of the stream. Loose white flint gravel is dug to a depth of 8 feet to pits on the east side of the road between Ashe Park Farm and the railway bridge ; and in shallower workings south of that bridge, and on the western side of Berrydown Copse. Loamy gravel, consisting of bleached angular flints with a few flint-pebbles, is dug on both sides of the Winchester road south-west of Kempshott House, and, though not mapped, is probably continuous with the gravel in the bottom at North Waltham. Itchen Basin.— Coarse gravel, consisting of angular flints with some flint-pebbles and a little compact red iron-sandstone in sub- angular pieces, occurs in the bottom of the valley which runs from * T. W. Shore, ' History of Hampshire' (Elliot Stock, London), 1892, p. 2, VALLEY GRAVEL. 93 Herriard down to Axford and Preston House. Shallow sections can be seen north-west and south-west of West Common Wood ; also at the cross-roads north-west of Preston Oak Hills, and at Berrydown Farm. In these exposures the stones have a matrix of red-brown loam, but the drift seems to become more sandy at Axford. Wey Basin.— I. The 'Lasham' Valley. A thick (un- mapped) deposit of flint-gravel occurs in the bottom of the valley followed by the Basingstoke and Alton Light Railway south of Herriard Station, and is exposed in a large working, 10 feet deep, on the north side of the railway by the level-crossing west of Lasham Hill. The gravel is coarse, loamy, and structureless. 2. The Wey Valley. In its passage through the south- eastern part of the area of Sheet 284, the Wey (North or Parnham Branch) is bordered by gravel-capped terraces which are referable to three hypsometric stages. As the correlation of the flu via tile deposits in the basin of the Wey has not yet been worked out, it seems undesirable to dis- tinguish local terrace-groups either by ordinal numbers, or by adjectives such as ' upper ' and ' highest,' for these terms, in so far as they prove to be inapplicable, with a like significance, to the drift- stages of other, and possibly closely-adjacent, parts of the drainag system, will be likely to embarrass the student who endeavours to obtain, a comprehensive view of the whole subject. The three stages above referred to will therefore be indicated severally by the name of a place situated either upon, or in the immediate neigh- bourhood of, a typical terrace in each of them ; the Bentley Stage including the terraces 35 to 40 feet above the level of the river, and the Isington and Groveland Stages, those respectively about 20 and 10 feet above the same datum, see fig. 14. The Bentley Stage. — The terraces herein have their chief development on the, left or north bank of the river and to them belong most of the deposits of Valley Gravel which are shown in that position on the map. Half a mile south of Froyle the Malmstone on the left bank of the Wey is capped, at 320 feet O.D., by a small deposit of yellow sandy gravel, which is exposed in the shallow railway-cutting and adjacent pits at a spot a little beyond the southern limit of the district. A little brown sandstone (probably Eocene) was noticed in this drift, but no chert. In the railway-cutting Dr. W. Curtis found " elephants' bones and teeth" 3 -'' — probably the remains (of Elephas primi- genius Blumenb., from " Millcourt,"f) which are still to be seen in the Curtis Museum at Alton. The gravel on the left bank (and below 310 feet) north-east of Froyle Mill, is on a slope and appears to be degraded, but the two patches south and south- east of Isington Mill, and on the right bank, partly cover a well-marked flat (300 to 305 feet), from the inner edge of which there is a sharp descent to the level of the stream. Road-banks south of the Isington Mill show, beneath the soil, about a foot of rather fine, stratified gravel made up of worn flints and flat pieces of siliceous malmstone, together with small quartz-pebbles and a few bits of silicified Inoceramus-shell, resting on G-ault clay. Returning to the north side of the river : the high road through Bentley, for a distance of nearly one and a half miles, follows the outer edge of a well- developed flat, which, by an observer standing in the midst of it, might easily * H. W. Bristow, in ' Geology of Parts of Berks, and Hants.' (Mem. Geol. Survey'), 1862, p. 47. t A place near the cutting but on the right bank of the river (see Sheet 300). 12761 G 94 VALLEY GRAVEL. q o M.-5 tic c .a CJ a *-. £ « =P CJ s». t-^ CO "3 W o o c^ i o 1 a -* i — i a> a IH C/J 3 fe -^ bo > c a o be mistaken for the true floor of the valley. This terrace declines in height, from about 300 feet O.D. at the western end to 285 feet at the eastern end, near Mareland House, and has a a? slight transverse slope towards the river. The inner edge coincides with the top of a low- bluff, interrupted here and there by the mouths of small gullies which cut through the gravel to the underlying Gault. This is the terrace marked (6) in fig. 14. A deeper gully, extending back to combes in the Chalk escarp- ment, separates the Bentley flat from the smaller terrace of Marsh House (280 to 285 feet), and a similar watercourse divides the latter from the terrace oh which Northbrook House (279 feet) is situated. When viewed as a whole, the terraces of the Bentley Stage are seen to fall gently north-eastward, at about the same gradient as the Wey, and there can be no doubt that they are remnants of an earlier flood-plain of that river, formed during a pause in the deepening of the valley. From a comparison of the average width, of the terraces with that of the modern flood-plain, it is to be inferred that the pause was of considerable duration ; and this inference finds confirmation in the gentleness of the slope by which the terraces merge into the higher ground at their outer edges. The contours of much of the ground above and behind the terraces on the left bank of the Wey seem, indeed, to have been moulded with reference to a local base-level or gradation- limit some 30 to 40 feet higher than the existing one ; and their mature character is in marked contrast with the fresh aspect of the low, slip-scarred bluffs beneath the terraces, and the steep- sided lateral watercourses by which the terraces are separated and trenched. The Isington Stage. — Only two terraces referable to this rather ill-defined stage have been recog 1 nized in the part of the Wey Valley under consideration. The larger of these (i, fig. 14) occurs at Isington, west of Bentley Station. Its heights above Ordnance Datum and river-level are, respectively, about 280 and 20 feet. The loamy flint-gravel by which it is covered is poorly exposed in a small field- pit a quarter of a mile west- south-west of Bentley Station. The other terrace referred to this stage is crossed by the Bentley-Farnham (or London) road south-west of Willey House. Its level here is about 249 feet O D. Near Willey Mill, farther east (Sheet 285), a pit in the bluff of this ter- race shows an excellent section which, though about 150 yards beyond the eastern O m a 7. VALLEY GRAVEL. 95 boundary of the Basingstoke district, will be briefly noticed here. The descending succession is : — Feet. ( Stony loam and wash, covering the edges Rain- wash ... -J of the subjacent beds on the scarp of ( the terrace 1 to 10 Brickearth ... Brown loam 2 Vallev eravel $ Fl m t-g rave l| we H stratified (no chert ob- y B "■ \ served) 7 resting unevenly on, Lower Greensand f Pale greenish-grey slightly-glauconitic, (Folkestone Beds) 1 co& ™? sand ' wlth Nicies of quartz- ■' I pebbles seen for 8 The Groveland Stage. — This is named after Groveland Mill * and Farm, which are situated on the right bank of the Wey, and south-west of the " Bull " inn, on the high-road east of Bentley. Though of small size and low relief, the four terraces in this stage form distinct features on the sides of the valley. Three occur on the right bank of the river — in the bends south of Froyle Mill, south-east of Mareland House, and south-west of the [Groveland] Mill, near the " Bull " inn ; and the fourth forms a ledge at the foot of the Bentley-terrace bluff, north west of Isington (g, fig. 14). Chert stones, doubtless derived from the Plateau Gravel of Alice Holt, occur sparingly in the terrace south-west of the " Bull " inn, before mentioned. Loddon Basin. 1. Blackwater Valley. — Part of a spread of gravel on the south side of this valley is shown at and near the north-eastern corner of Sheet 284. The gravel contains a good deal of Hythe-Beds chert, and, in places, as near Eversley Church, rests on a terrace between 20 and 40 feet above the Blackwater. 2. In the Hart Valley, gravel rises from beneath the alluvium on either side of the stream at Hartford Bridge. 3. Whitewater Valley. — A rough gravel of angular flints in a loamy ground-mass has been dug in many places by the roadside between Weston Patrick and Bidden Water. About three furlongs south-east of Ford Farm, near the lower end of the South Warnborough branch of the valley, a good section of Valley Gravel is presented in a long roadside excavation. The drift here consists of angular and subangular flints, with some flint pebbles and small blocks of compact, fine-grained, red ironstone (possibly from the Reading Beds), in a matrix of red-brown sandy loam. In places, however, there is much chalk-rubble, and here the drift shows signs of a bedding not elsewhere apparent. The largest spread of Valley Gravel in the district occurs at Burtley Heath, between North Warnborough and Hook. It lies between 240 and 250 feet O.D., and slopes gently down to the Whitewater alluvium, beneath which it is probably continuous with the smaller spreads near Lodge and Poland Farms. The gravel is dug in several pits, the largest of which is about three furlongs north-west of the bridge at the northern end of North Warnborough village. This shows : — Soil, passing down into, Feet. i Mottled loam, and stiff sandy clay with few ■rr li p i 1 stones ... ... ... ... ... ... 1 to 3 ^ ^ Loamy and clayey flint-gravel, of varying ' texture and wet at bottom ... seen for 7 • There are signs of bedding in places, but the bulk of the gravel is unstratified. The proportion of angular and slightly-worn flints is so large that it seems probable that the gravel originally contained a good deal of chalk-rubble, t * Formerly Bentley Mill, see Sheet 8 of the original Geological Survey Map. Neither mill nor farm is named on Sheet 284 (1905 issue). t See also H. W. Monckton, Quart. Journ. Beol. Soo., vol. xlviii., 1892, p. 39. 12761 G 2 96 VALLEY GRAVEL. At Mattingley a small plateau (205 to 224 feet O.D.) about 30 to 40 feet above the Whitewater is capped by ochreous sandy and loamy flint-gravel, which is worked in shallow pits west of the church and north-west of Harper's Farm. In places the gravel is cemented into small ' ferrells.' Chert seems to be absent, though Mr. Monckton found it to be abundant at Hazeley Heath, on the opposite side of the river. At Hound Green, north-west of Mattingley, there is a smaller gravel-flat, at about the same height above the Whitewater as the last. 4. Lyde Valley. — A white gravel, consisting of bleached flints and small pebbles of chalk in a coarse gritty sand which, in places, abounds in small Chalk fossils, underlies and rises from beneath the peat of Andwell Moor, south-west of Nately Scures. 5. L odd on Valley. — Parts of the gravel on the bottom of the valley at Basingstoke are chalky. North of Blackland's Farm there is a spread of rather fine gravel, which rises a few feet above the level of the adjacent alluvium. Its position in the valley, and the indented form of its eastern or down-stream margin, suggest that it is a shoal which has developed mainly by intermittent accretion on its northern side. Rather more than half a mile north-east of Blackland's Farm a low ridge of gravel (just touching the contour of 200 feet) forms an eyot in the flood-land. The gravel at Sherfield is loamy, and seems to be of small thickness. Kennet Basin. — Bleached gravel underlies the flat ground of Stony Heath, in the valley of the stream which rises near Ewhurst. Where exposed in shallow pits, five furlongs south-east of Brown's Farm, it consists mainly of angular flints mixed with a fine, loamy, grey sand, in which prisms of silicified Inoceramus-sheU are abundant. Probably this deposit once was very chalky ; it perhaps is so still, in its lower parts. It may be regarded as a sort of delta or fan of a stream that formerly flowed from the incipient 'anticlinal vale' in the Chalk upland to the south (p. 81). Brickearth. The drift-loams which are mapped as Brickearth rest upon and overlap the low-level gravels, and in this respect, as well as in their lithological character, they resemble some of the deposits classed as Alluvium. Although in many cases they lie wholly above flood-level, and in others rise from beneath the alluvial deposits to heights unattained by modern inundations, it is highly probable that they are, in the main, of fluviatile origin. Their boundaries, like those of the Alluvium, are very vague, the loams of fluviatile aspect passing insensibly into rain-wash and soil at the sides of the valleys. A thin spread of brickearth, resting partly on Valley Gravel, partly on Gault, occurs on the terrace to the south of Bentley (fig. 14, b), and seems to extend a little farther north than is shown on the map. Another small patch is mapped to the south-west of Crondall, and a larger deposit, of a rather coarse and sandy character, occurs on the bottom and western side of the combe south-east of Odiham. A small mass forms a tract of firm ground in the western part of the marsh south-west of Nateley Scures ; another occurs on the Chalk at the southern edge of the marsh, and two more deposits form low terraces on the right bank of the River Lyde to the west of Newnham. 97 CHAPTER XV. ALLUVIUM. The Loddon, the Whitewater, and the Hart on the north, and the Farnham or North Branch of the Wey on the south-east, flow briskly along meandering courses, through tracts of marsh and water-meadow whose width seldom exceeds one half, and is usually less than one fourth, of a mile. In the marshy places, where the ground falls away gently to the level of the stream, the soil is often neaty, but where bordered by water-meadows the streams usually have definite banks, which show indistinctly-laminated grey or brown loam and silty clay, commonly calcareous. Shells of land and fresh-water mollusca occur sporadi- cally, but no good example of shell-marl was noticed by the writer. Gravel commonly occurs in the stream-beds, and when the water is clear the eroded edges of the layer of gravel which underlies much of the loam and peat can often be sepn. The age of this bottom-gravel is uncertain. Probably portions of it— and especially those which rise to the surface at the sides of the valleys, or form the shoal-like islands in the flood-plains — are of late Pleistocene age ; but there is reason to believe that much of the coarse material beneath the loams has been rearranged by the rivers in Recent times. In the Loddon Valley, peat occurs, among other places, at Peat Moor west of Basing Park, and in the marsh between the parallel courses of the Loddon and the Lyde, west of Tylney Hall. A t Peat Moor, trenches at the water-cress beds south of the Work- house are cut in friable grey marl, which contains some fibrous vegetable matter and fragments of shell, but consists chiefly of fine calcareous mud and minute quartz-grains (mostly under 0*1 m.m.), together with tests of foraminifera and ostracoda, and other material obviously derived from the Chalk. Near its northern edge it includes seams of fine chalk-rubble and chips of flint. The alluvium by the bridge north of Sherfield is of a different character : it consists of grey-brown, non-calcareous, stiff, loamy clay, 4 or 5 feet thick, resting on gravel, and passing up into rusty- brown loam and vegetable mould. Lyde Valley. — At Andwell Moor, between the branches of the Lyde south-west of Nateley Scures, an expanse of marsh, broken by low islands, occupies a basin between the dip-slope of the Chalk and the escarpment of the London Clay. South of Priory Farm, some trenches made or widened in 1908 showed 1 to \\ feet of black and dark-brown quaking peat, resting evenly on white chalky gravel full of spring-water, and passing laterally into roughly- laminated silty loam and clay at the southern edge of the marsh. In other parts of the Moor drainage- trenches show black peaty earth with scattered bleached flints and small bits of chalk. In the Hart Valley there are several tracts of peat-bog, notably to the south and west of Crookham, and by Elvetham Park. In its course through the Bracklesham-Beds country, between Crookham and Hartford Bridge, the Hart is fed by many small 98 ALLUVIUM. chalybeate springs, which colour the flood-loam and soil in their neighbourhood a warm red. An easily-accessible deposit of alluvium, stained in this manner, occurs north-east of Vale Farm, east of Winchfield Station. Wey Valley. — Gravel can be seen in the bed of the river below the mill-dams, and in other places where the water is shallow. At the foot-bridge near the county boundary the gravel in the bed of the stream is about 2 feet thick, and rests on stiff, blue, Gault clay, which, however, contains scattered bleached flints, and is probably part of a slipped mass. Small landslips are of frequent occurrence on the rather steep sides of the valley here- abouts, as the hummocky and fissured state of the ground plainly shows. The visible parts of the finer alluvium are dark-grey calcareous clays and loams, with intercalated seams of sand, drift-wood, and shelly loam. Fairly clear exposures can be seen in the banks of the stream at Isington, and at the bend south-east of Mareland House. At the latter spot the banks show between 5 and 6 feet of stiff loam or loamy clay, mostly below summer water-level. Here portions of the loam are shelly, and in small samples taken at a horizon about two feet below the upper surface of the alluvium Mr. A. S. Kennard recognized the following common species of mollusca ; — Arion ater (Linn.). Pisidium amnicum (Mull.). Bithynia tentaculata (Linn.). Planorbis albus (Mull.). Oochlicopa lubrica (Mull.). Valvata piscinalis (Mull.). Hygromia hispida (Linn.). Small fragments of mammalian bones were observed with the shells. Part of the calcareous constituent of the Wey alluvium occurs in the form of small tufaceous concretions — mostly less than - 25 mm. in diameter, in tne samples examined by the writer. 99 CHAPTER XVL ECONOMIC GEOLOGY. Soils. It was remarked in the introduction to this memoir that the country around Basingstoke is divided naturally into three parts, namely, (1) the small malm and clay area on the Selbornian Beds, in the south-east, (2) the Chalk country, and (3) the 'Woodlands' tract on the Eocene strata and their gravel-capping, to the north. Each of these divisions has its peculiar group of soils, whose characters will now be briefly noticed. The Selbornian Area.— The soil on the Gault near Bentley varies considerably in character. On the plateau of Alice Holt it is loamy clay,* tempered in places by a wash of sand and gravel, but mostly uncultivated and grown with oak and conifers. On the higher part of the western slope of the plateau, and to the north of Catham Copse, the clay is barely covered with soil, and the moist lumpy ground is used mostly for pasturage. On the lower slopes of the (Blacknest) valley between Lodge Inclosure and Catham Copse the soil is sufficiently thick and light for cultivation. The course of the Wey is bordered by narrow belts of water- meadow, which pass up into dryer pasture on the slopes. The, gravel-terraces are covered by light loams (modified ' brickearth '), and support mixed arable and pasture land. Farther north there are clayey slopes, largely under timber and grass, which give place to ploughed land near the boundary of the Malmstone. The light-grey, friable loams formed by the disintegration of the malm and overlying Chloritic Marl are well known for their fertility, and the curving outcrops of these rocks along the north- western margin of the Weald are marked by a belt of hop-gardens and wheat-land. The relation of soil to subsoil is here an intimate one, for, except in the lowest parts of the broad depressions which lead up to the combes in the Chalk escarpment, there is a notable absence of superficial deposits. The Chalk Area. — Though generally good, the soils on the Lower Chalk seem to be of a more variable nature than those on Malmstone, and in places contain a good deal of stony wash from the Upper Chalk and the Clay-with-Flints. Higher up the escarpment, where the firm beds of the Middle Chalk come in, the slopes steepen and the soil deteriorates as a whole, while its variability becomes more pronounced. Here most of the arable land lies on the lower side-slopes of the combes, and on the top of clay-capped ridges, the thinly-covered chalk in the intervening ground being largely under grass or copse. The general characters of the soils on the Upper Chalk are indicated on the geological map, where the information conveyed by the drift-colouring is supplemented by engraved notes. Over the ; * Gilbert White calls it " a strong loam, of a miry nature." Pennant Letters, No. ii., in ' The Natural History ... of Selborne . . .' 1789. 100 ECONOMIC GEOLOGY. greater part of this area there is a fair thickness of loamy or marly soil, though chalk usually lies close to the surface on the steeper slopes, and not infrequently does so on moderately-inclined ground, as about Basingstoke Down and Popham Beacons. The thick accumulations of Clay-with-Flints on the higher parts of the southern Chalk range, between Well and Dummer, and to the west of Lasham, support many woods and copses of beech and oak, together with some small tracts of furze and scrub on the stonier parts, as to the north of Froyle. They appear, however, to yield good cereal crops about Farligh Wallop and Ellisfield. The hop is cultivated on light loam and Brickearth between Crondall and Greywell ; also on heavier soil, at Long Sutton and Well. The marly soil on the floor of the Vale of Krngsclere is cultivated in wide, low-hedged fields, the enclosing slopes being under grass. In the Area of the Eocene Beds, the soil ranges from stiff intractable clay, at one extreme, to loose sandy gravel, destitute of vegetable-mould, at the other. Along the line of shallow valleys marking the narrow outcrop- surface of the Reading Beds, the ground is generally clayey, wet, and of little use save for rough pasture. In the neighbourhood of Upper Nately, however, where these beds contain much sand (partly glauconitic), they are covered by a light ferruginous loam, on which good grain-crops can be raised. On the London Clay and superincumbent * drift ' in the Loddon and Whitewater Valleys, and on the more arenaceous Lower Bagshot strata about Baughurst and Bramley, there is commonly a good thickness of arable loam. "Some of the strongest and best of this land," says Wilkinson, "occupies what is locally called the 'Hampshire basin,' [partly] an alluvial formation . . situated chiefly in the parishes of Basing and Sherfield, and intersected by the Berks and Hants Railway . . . Oaks grow well everywhere in this soil ; elms may be seen in the more generous parts ; all of it once was, and much of it still is, in wood, either in hedgerows or coppices, so that it well deserves the name of ' The Hampshire Woodlands.' Whether under cultivation or timbered, this . . . soil extends throughout the whole of the northern district [of Hampshire] as a sea, out of which rise islands of furze and heath on commons, and fir plantations. " About Pamber and Silchester there is much sharp and unprofitable gravel on the surface ; but the better parts are good barley land. The same may be said of West Heath, Baughurst, and Tadley."* On Hook Common, where the London Clay is covered by a thin wash of gravel, the ground is boggy, and grown in places with cotton-grass. To the south of this, and also on Odiham Common, where there is little soil, the clay is thickly wooded. The sandy and gravel-capped Upper Bagshot ridges of Hartford Bridge Flats and Fleet are covered almost entirely by heath and fir-plantations, and, to judge from the appearance of the crops in the small clearings, the attempts to cultivate the poor dry soil have met with little success. In the surrounding moister country of the Bracklesham Beds there are considerable tracts of arable loam, * Rev. J. Wilkinson, ' The Farming of Hampshire,' Journ. Roy. Agric. Sec. vol. xxii., 1861, p. 248. LAND DRESSING. 101 mostly on the lower slopes of the valleys, but a great part of the ground is covered by woods and plantations of a mixed character, much frequented by the magpie. . In a belt of country extending from Gaily Hill, by Shapley Heath, to Phoenix Green, there are several hop-fields on the fine sandy loams over the Bracklesham and Lower Bagshot Beds. The writer was informed that the hops on the latter formation at Phoenix Green give a satisfactory yield, but require to be shifted to fresh ground at intervals of six or seven years. Land Dressing. In the parish of Bentley, and more extensively in the country to the east and south-west (outside the area of Sheet 284), the softer beds of the Upper Greensand (malm), the Chloritic Marl, and the marly chalk of the Varians Zone have been used as manure for all kinds of soil except their own. With reference to the Chloritic Marl in this neighbourhood, Mr. J. M. Paine, writing about 1850, states that he has " extensively and exclusively used the [phosphatised fossils and phosphatic nodules of this bed], as well as those still more abundantly obtained from the Lower Greensand, as substitutes for bones in the manufacture of superphosphate of lime for the use of [his] farm ; and that, both as regards cheapness and efficacy, [he has] every reason to be satisfied with their employment for this purpose." * He and Professor Way remark that, " in addition to the unusual[ly high] percentage of phosphoric acid and potash [this ' Green Marl '] contains, it is not unlikely that some part of its fertility is connected with the [large] quantity of silica present in a soluble condition." f The Chloritic Marl of Bentley is no longer worked, though it was formerly so highly esteemed for its agricultural properties that it was considered worth while to carry it into Sussex. J The abundance of the overgrown pits or ' dells ' which dimple the surface of the fields in the Chalk country south of Basingstoke proves that the practice of ' chalking ' or ' marling ' the heavier of the upland soils once was more prevalent than now. Most of the workings are of the ordinary open type, but near Farleigh Wallop and Herriard, and in other places where the over-burden of Clay-with-Flints is considerable, there are remains of the under- ground workings known as ' chalk-wells.' It has been said that chalk is the " salvation " of the clayey and sandy soils on the Eocene Beds in Hampshire, and this rock is still much used as manure in the northern part of the Basingstoke district. The chalk of the Marsupites Zone,§ and especially of the Uintacrinus Band, usually is employed for this purpose ; partly, no doubt, because of its accessibility along tbe Eocene boundary, but chiefly on account of its softness and small content of flints. " The proper quantity for application,'' writes Wilkinson, " and the necessity of renewal, depend on the nature of the soil ; where chalk is wanted as a cor- rective of acidity in the soil, as after an oak or ash coppice has' been grubbed, one * J. T. Way and J. M. Paine, ' The Chemical and Agricultural Characters of the Chalk Formation.' J own. Roy. Agrio. Soc, vol. xii., 1851, p. 550, footnote. t Up. at., p. 551. j< Paine and Way, ■ On the Phosphoric Strata of the Chalk Formation,' Journ. Roy. Agrio. Hoc, vol. ix., 1848, p. 73. § The results of a chemical analysis of this chalk (at Crondall) will be found in Way and Paine's paper on ' The Chemical and Agricultural Characters of the Chalk Formation,' Jiiwn. Roy. Agric. Soc, vol. xii., 1851, pp. 553, 554. 102 ECONOMIC GEOLOGY. good dose of 20 or 25 tons an acre may effect a complete cure, and no renewal be required. On heavy clay lands the use is mechanical as well as mineral [i.e., chemical], and here as much as 30 tons may be applied at a time. From personal inquiries made throughout the county, I arrived at this rule — that 1 ton per acre per annum is the usual allowance ; that is, if 20 tons are applied, the renewal must be in 20 years, and so on ; but this rate does not apply to peaty soils. . . . Chalk is wanted near the surface, within reach of the plough and of cultivation ; but in such soils it will sink by its own specific gravity, and Should, therefore, be applied at twice, with an interval of perhaps five years between. At the second application the land will be firmer, and not let the chalk in so much. " Trial has been made of the relative cost and effect of chalk and lime. The ordinary calculation throughout the county is that chalk delivered in the field costs 5s. a cavt-load, or £5 an acre if 20 loads are applied. The calculation, made in a particular but not exceptional, instance for lime was that in the field it cost 3s. per quarter, or £3 an acre if 20 quarters were applied. But though this gives a balance of £2 an acre in favour of lime, yet such was the superior efficacy of chalk that the experiment resulted in the preference of chalk, notwithstanding its greater cost." ,:! Building Materials. Stone. — The harder calcareous beds of the Selbornian Malmstone have been largely used in the construction of dwellings, park and garden walls, and farm-buildings at Froyle, and to a less extent at Lower Froyle and about Isington. Bentley Church and some of the farm-houses on the Chalk escarpment also are built partly or wholly of this rock. Except for repairing work, however, the malmstone seems now to be little used in this part of the country, and the quarries are, for the most part, overgrown. Flint, in conjunction with brick or stone, has been employed for building in many places, notably at North Waltham. Crondall, Upper Nately, Mapledurwell, Ellisfield, and Farleigh Wallop are among the other Chalk-country villages which afford instances of its use. In the country of the Eocene strata flint-work is less often found. Mention may be made of the ' rustic ' ornamentation of unt-rimmed nodules on the lodge north-east of Wolverton House. Chalk has been little used. There are chalk cottages in The Dell t at Kingsclere, and blocks of soft Upper Chalk occur in an old building by the cross-roads in Mapledurwell village. Sandstone suitable for building purposes occurs in the Reading Beds at Upper Nately, and is exposed in the brickyard west of the church. The bed (described at p. 46) is probably of limited extent. There are blocks of this or a similar sandstone in the walls of an old cottage south-west of the brickyard. The shelly limestone in the Basement-bed of the London Clay, though in places very hard and capable of standing long exposure to the weather, is usually too fissile for use as building stone. Gr. Longf mentions an instance of its use in a cottage " under Warren Corner," north of Clare Park. * J. Wilkinson, ' The Farming of Hampshire,' Journ. Boy. Agric. Sec., vol. xxii., 1861, pp. 322, 323. f It is said that the chalk for these cottages was obtained from a pit by the Itchenswell road, west of Kingsclere. J 'On the Occurrence of numerous Swallow Holes, near Farnham, &c.,' Proc. GeoL Sno., vol. iii.. 1841 (p. 3 of MS. of this paper, in the library of the Geological Society). BUILDING MATERIALS. 103 ' Ferrells ' (blocks of ironstone-conglomerate) from the gravels are occasionally used for rough masonry, as in banks by the roadside near the " New " inn, south-east of Heckfield. Bricks form the principal building material used in this district, and all the local argillaceous formations have been worked for this article. Rough bricks of a pale red tint, with a lemon-coloured mottling, are manufactured from a silty marl in the Grault at Bentley Brick- works, south-west of Bentley Station. At Alice Holt Brickworks, by the north-eastern end of Lodge Pond, light-red bricks are made from a mixture of the stiff, slightly-calcareous Gault clay, got on the spot, and sand (of the Folkestone Beds) carted up from Wrecclesham. The clays and sands of the Beading Beds, either alone or in conjunction with the lower beds of the London Clay, are worked at Sherborne St. John, Basing, Upper Nately, and at Crondall Pottery north of Clare Park. There are brick-pits in the lower part of the London Clay at Chineham, and in the upper beds of the formation at Bunker's Hill, Newnham, Odiham Common, and other places. The sandy clays of the Lower Bagshot Beds are well adapted for the manufacture of bricks, and the largest factory in the district is situated on these beds, at Ramsdell. They have been worked also at Hartley Row, Odiham Common, and Crookham. The Bracklesham Beds contain two well-marked groups of light argillaceous strata suitable for brick-making. The lower of these has been worked, among other places, at Tadley and Little London in the western part of the district, and at Hazeley Heath in the eastern part : the upper group is worked at Shapley and Hazeley Heaths, and was formerly dug at Gaily Hill, south of Fleet. In bygone times the loamy portions of the Clay-with-Flints in the Chalk country were worked in many small brickyards. As might be expected, from the variable character of this drift, the bricks made from it were frequently of poor quality. The principal yards seem to have been those at Berrydown Farm (south-west of Ashe), Popham, Preston Copse, Nutley, Broadmere Bradley Hill, and Weston Common. Preston House, south of Axford, is said to have been built of bricks made in the old yard at Preston Copse.* The Broadmere bricks are of a conglomeratic character, owing to the prevalence of small flint-pebbles in the loams at that place. The loams mapped separately as Brickearth appear to be of little economic value. There are signs of shallow diggings in the spread of this material which occurs on river-terrace south of Bentley. Sand is dug in most of the localities where it occurs in bulk. The positions of the principal pits, and the nature of the sand got in them, are noticed in other parts of this Memoir {see chapters vi., viii.-x.). * T. W, Shore, ' The Clays of Hampshire and their Economic Uses,' Proc. Hampshire Field Cluh. 1890, p. 41. 104 ECONOMIC GEOLOGY. Fireclay occurs, in small quantities, in the Reading Beds at Upper Nately (p. 46). Lime. — In this part of the country there are few lime-kilns, and none of those seen by the writer was in regular use. The chalk of the Terebratulina Zone, and that of the more argillaceous Subglo- bosus Zonp, are well adapted for the manufacture of strong building lime. Chalk of the latter Zone has been burnt near Froyle and Lower Froyle. Whiting. — There seem to be no whiting-factories in this district,* though the Uintacrinus Chalk, which forms the best raw material, is quarried for other purposes in many places. Road Metal. The hardest beds of the Malmstone (Upper Greensand) are occasionally used for road-mending, but the local materials chiefly employed for this purpose are the Plateau and Valley Gravels, the gravelly portions of the Clay-with-Flints, and flints gathered from the soil over the Chalk. Flints taken directly from the Chalk are sometimes laid down, but the result is unsatis- factory, as the untempered nodules quickly break into sharp flakes under the traffic. Examples of rough pavements or ' pitches ' of flint-nodules, either whole or broken, can be seen at Bentley, Odiham, Crondall, and in many other places. Ochreous gravel, suitable for paths, is dug at Mattingly, and north of Chatter Alley. Ferrells and blocks of sandstone (sarsens) are utilized for corner- guards, posts, and curbing along the roads. Springs and Water Supply. Although the hydrology of the Basingstoke district will be dealt with in a forthcoming Memoir on the Water Supply of Hampshire, a few notes on the subject will not be out of place in the present work. On the whole, this district is well provided with water, which can be obtained, in quantities sufficient for local requirements, from most of the permeable strata; though in many places the wells have to be sunk to considerable depths to reach it. From the Upper Greensand exposed in the Wey Valley, near Bentley, there are a few springs, mostly of small volume. The principal one seems to be that situated about a quarter of a mile west of Froyle Mill, near the spot where the Wey crosses the ill-defined junction of the Gault and the Malmstone beds. Farther down the valley the Malmstone rises well above river-level, and yields little or no water at the surface, though supplies are obtained from wells sunk through it to the retentive clayey beds below. North of Froyle a strong spring from the Lower Chalk forms the Ryebridge Brook, which crosses the line of the direct road * In the Geological Survey Memoir on ' The Cretaceous Rocka of Britain,' (vol. iii, IMOi. p. 3'JS), it is stated that whiting (or whitening) is made at Odiham. The present writer could hear of no factory there. WATER. 105 from Froyle to Lower Froyle near the former place, and flows through the picturesque ravine of Quarry Bottom, south-east of Froyle Church. Some of the rain absorbed on the Upper Chalk uplands in the southern aDd western parts of the district is thrown out at the springs which occur in groups along the boundary of the Reading Beds, between Kingsclere and Crondall, and in the bottoms of the Chalk combes, at varying distances to the south of that line. The chief of these groups are situated between Basing and Basingstoke, at Andwell Moor (south-west of Nately Scures), and at Grey well, while others of less importance occur at Kingsclere, Wolverton, Ewhurst, Sherborne St. .John, east of Odiham, north of Itchell House, and at Crondall. East of Crondall, where the boundary of the Reading Beds turns southward, and the base of that formation rises above ground-water level, springs are replaced by swallow- holes. One of these sinks, to the south-east of the House in Clare Park,* catches part of the surface-drainage of the clayey ground on the western slopes of Beacon Hill. The position of the head-springs of the streams which originate in the Chalk country varies with the seasons, though not to so great an extent as in certain other Chalk regions in the south of England. In years of normal rainfall the Elver Test rises between Ashe and Deane, but in the wet year of 1881 it rose at Spring Pond, by the side of the Basingstoke and Andover road, at a point three furlongs south-west of darken Green. Mr. C. E. Hawkins ascertained that the ground-water was approximately 20 feet below the surface when he visited the spot (? summer of 1891). The Loddon occasionally rises in a field east of Crossway Farm, near Worting. At long intervals the Candover branch of the Itchen rises near Preston House, south of Axford. Both syllables of the name of the latter place indicate the former presence of a si ream still higher up the Axford valley, but the writer was assured by an old resident in the neighbourhood that no bourne had flowed at Axford for at least sixty years, though melting snow had been known to cause floods there. The average level of the ground- water at Preston Candover and Axford is said to be about 30 feet below the surface in the bottom of the valley. The information collected by Mr. C. E. Hawkins and the writer concerning the wells in the Chalk area goes to show that the height of the ground-water surface there lies generally between 270 and 300 feet above Ordnance Datum, but is rather higher (315 to 320 feet) beneath the summit of the southern range of downs, about Farleigh Wallop and Herriard. A comparison of the height of the water-table in the wells in the latter part of the Chalk country with the height of the nearest springs at the Eocene boundary to the north, shows that the ground-water surface has a northward gradient varying from 10 to 20 feet per mile. So far as the writer is aware, the deepest well in the Chalk area (and in the whole district) is that at Herriard House. This is partly sunk, partly bored, to a depth of 404 feet below well-head,! * See G. Long, Proc. Geol. Soo. vol. iii., 1841, p. 349. f Mr. Hawkins's MS. notes on the six-inch field map. 106 ECONOMIC GEOLOGY. and about 90 to 100 feet below the general water-level in that part of the country. The deepest dug well in the Chalk appears to be that at Freemantle Park Farm, north-west of Hannington : this was 347 feet in the spring of 1908, when it was about to be deepened.* Water is obtained from the Chalk beneath the Eocene Beds, among other places, at Kingsclere, Ewhurst, Monk Sherborne, Sherfield (southern boundary of the parish), and Mill Lane, (near Crondall). From a boring made through part of the London Clay ■and the Reading Beds near Four Lanes Farm, south-west of SherfieLI, water from the Chalk overflows at the surface (See Sherfield, No. 2, in the Appendix). The Reading Beds occupy so small an area at the surface, and consist there so largely of clay, that no large supplies of water are to be expected from them. In the Sherfield boring, mentioned in the last paragraph, water from the top of these beds rose to within 2 feet of the surface of the ground. In another boring in the same parish (see below) a bed at about the same horizon swallowed the water obtained at a higher level. Mr. J. H. Blake notes the existence of a short tube-well in Reading Beds at Priory Farm, in the marsh south-west of Nately Scures ; and, according to Sir J. Prestwich, a well made many years ago at Dogmersfield House ends in this formation (see Appendix, p. 108). The Basement-bed of the London Clay yields a little water in inconsiderable springs at its outcrop. In one locality, however, a group of sandy beds, struck at depth, and most probably referable to this horizon, provided a good supply. The well alluded to is that at Longbridge Mill, at the edge of the Loddon alluvium north-east of Sherfield village. A boring made here in 1890-91 traversed water-bearing " greensand " and " sandstone " between 288 and 301^ feet below the surface of the ground, and between 111 and 124^ feet below Ordnance Datum. This, like the well near Four Lanes Farm, south-west of Sherfield, is a true artesian well, the water overflowing at surface-level (177 feet O.D.). and having a head of 9 feet. Details of the boring will be found in the Appendix (p. 109), but it may be mentioned here that the water was lost by absorption in some dry bed. probably Reading sand, when the well was temporarily deepened ; and that a hard band, yielding saline water, was encountered in the body of the London Clay. Concerning the wells which are sunk in the argillaceous middle and upper parts of the London Clay, little information is forthcom- ing. For the most part they are shallow, and it is likely that many of them are mere sumps or catch-pits for water percolating through the soil. In the well near Four Lanes Farm (Sherfield), mentioned above, a little water was found in a pebble-bed about 100 feet above the base of the formation. The Lower Bagshot sands, together with the loamy beds at the top of the London Clay, appear to be the principal water-bearing strata of the ' Woodlands ' country, and most of the older villages * Information furnished by Dr. F. P. Josoelyne, of Kingsclere. WATER. 107 in the northern part of the Basingstoke district stand on these terrains. Many small springs and seepages occur at their outcrop- ping edges : the wells in them are generally of small depth — 20 to 40 feet. Though the Bracklesliam Beds contain a good deal of water where they occur in mass, they do not form a aatisfactory source of supply. They furnish few well-marked springs ; their water, held up by beds and seams of sandy clay at various horizons, leaks out at innumerable points on the slopes, forming small patches of boggy ground. Dip-wells and water-holes are characteristic features of the country on the Bracklesham and Lower Bag.-hot Beds. Frequently the water from the Bracklesham loams is strongly chalybeate,.and, on exposure to the air, deposits a flocculent and slimy coating of red iron-ore on the vegetation in the channels of the brooks. The Upper Bagshot Beds are practically waterless, as the absorbed rain quickly sinks through their loose sands into the beds below. On the Clay-with- Flints there are numerous ponds, main- tained by rain and dew. Among the larger ponds those of Hannington, Popham, Ellisfield, Moundsmere (east of Axford), and Lasham may be mentioned. The Plateau Gravels hold little or no water where they rest on, sand, as usually, is the case. Small supplies are obtained from deposits of this class overlying the Gault in Alice Holt.* Water of doubtful potability occurs in the larger spreads of Valley Gravel (above local river-level) on the London Clay, and in wet weather frequently floods the excavations in these deposits. Water for cattle is obtainable from the bottom-gravels, below the modern flood-loams. * R. I. Murchison, Tram. Geol. Sue. ser. 2, vol. ii., pt. 1, 1826, p. 100. 108 WELL SECTIONS APPENDIX. Fouk Well Sections. Dogmersfield. Dogmerspield Hodse [above 300 feet O.D.]. (J. Prestwich, Quart. Journ. Geol. Soc, vol. x„ 1854, p. 97, as amended by W. Whitaker, G-eology of the London Basin, 1872, p. 446.) [Lower] Bagshot sand, 40 ft. London Clay, 3351 ft. Reading Beds, 4IJ ft. J Clay and sand I Fine light-bluish sand f Blue clay with septaria f Green sand "] Basement-bed -{ Stone (septaria) |__ (_ Green sand f Mottled clay, yellow, red, and grey J Clayey sand, bluish-grey striped red } Brown clay mottled with grey ... (_ Mottled light grey and red clay ... Feet ... 15 ... 25 ... 330 li ... 21 11 5 ... 10 . ... Hi ... 15 417 Monk Sherborne. The Rectory. 1887. [About 310 feet O.D.] (W. Whitaker, Hampshire Well Sections, Proc. Hamps. Field Club, No. iii., 1889, pp. 33, 34-). Made and communicated by Messrs. Legrand and Sutcliffe. Shaft 30 feet (? old well), the rest bored. (London clay) (Reading Beds, 67 ft.) Chalk and flints Clay and septaria I Clay with shells Mottled clay ... Sandy clay ... Mottled clay... Hard clay Black sand Thickness. Depth Feet. Feet. 30 30 5 35 25 60 16 76 91 851 . 141 100 2 102 28 130 WELL SECTIONS. 109 Sherfield-upon-Loddon. I. Longbridge Mill [north-east of village, 177 feet O.D.]. 1891. (W. "Whitaker, Hampshire Well Sections, Proc. Hamps. Field Club, vol. iv., 1898, pt. 1, pp. 39, 40.) Communicated by Mr. C. Lethbridge. Dug 10 feet, the rest bored. Water, from the depth of 297 feet, overflowed, at the rate of about 7,600 gallons in 24 hours. (Dec. 1890.) [Mr. J. H. Blake was informed that the water rose 9 feet above the ground.] Thickness. Depth. Pt. In. Ft. In. Gravelly [London OlayJ [? London Clay [? Basement- bed of London Clay, or Reading Beds] [? Reading Beds] f Sandy clay, with 4 or 5 thin beds of white hard stuff, something like chalk, from 3 to 8 inches thick [septaria] ... Rock. Saline spring at the base, yielding at the surface, 1,728 gallons in 24 hours , Black stiff clay or Reading Beds] Red clay [? brown] ... [ Greensand J Hard stone | Sandstone. Water increased suddenly 1^ and enormously Clay. Bored into for holding the silt, and lost the water. Filled in with rammed clay, and the water recovered Bed which took away the water [presum- (_ ably sand].f [?10 0] [?10 0]* 160 170 1 10 91 2 171 263 10 25 288 7 2 295 297 4 6 301 6 4 305 6 2. Rev. G-. A. Barker's Hodse, half-a-mile east of Four Lanes Farm, and five furlongs north of Basing Lodge Farm. 1906. Made and communicated by Messrs. G-. Allsebrook and Co. Level about 222 feet O.D. '(Dug well) Brown and blue clay ... Blue and brown clay Blue clay Black water-worn gravel [small flint pebbles] with water Blue clay Loamy sand Blue sandy clay Blue clay Brown sandy clay Clay, green sand, and shells London Clay, 128 ft. Thickness. Depth Feet. 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