On the Relation of the Westleton Beds, or Pebbly Sands of Suffolk, to those of Norfolk, and on their Extension Inland; with some Observations on the Period of the Final Elevation and Denudation of the Weald and of the Thames Valley, &c.—Part I
§ 1. Introduction. In a paper on the Crag Beds of Norfolk and Suffolk t which I had the honour of laying before the Society early in 1870, I proposed to term the great bed of flint-pebbles overlying the Chillesford Beds and underlying the Boulder-clay in Suffolk, the “Westleton Sands and Shingle,” remarking that “the importance to be attached to those beds does not arise so much from their exhibition here [Suffolk], as from the circumstance that they will serve to determine the position and age of some beds of sand and gravel, generally without fossils, which have a wide range in the south-east of England, and the exact [geological] position of which it is important to know in consequence of their bearing on many interesting problems connected with the denudation of the country." I further mentioned that these marine sands and shingle had a much greater extension than had their associated beds on the Norfolk coast, that they ranged through Suffolk, Essex, and far up the Thames Basin, and that the main character by which they were to be recognized was tbe great preponderance of well-worn rounded pebbles of flint and of white quartz, with smaller variable proportions of angular or subangular chalk-flints, and of Lower-Greensand chert and ragstone, mixed with a few pebbles of quartzite, sandstones, slates, and lydian stone, the whole indicating the action of currents or streams, not from the north as with the Glacial Drifts, but from the south and south-east. For some years afterwards various circumstances