Mr. Richard Taylor believes this bed, as visible at Hasborough, to be an extension of the well-known stratum at Watton cliff and Harwich. “There is,” he says, “evidence sufficient to prove that it extends more south than Palling, even as low down as Winterton, and Caister; also at Lowestoft.”
The two last strata nearest the chalk are the
Blue Clay and the Red Gravel.
These two beds “seem to have been deposited contemporaneously, as they are much intermixed, and every where contain the same species of mammalian remains. From the unusual quantity of bones contained in these strata, they have been provincially termed the Bone Rocks, but from the immense quantity of elephants’ bones annually exhumed, they may, for the sake of distinction, be termed the Elephant Beds.” In some places the blue clay is deposited upon the red gravel.
The red gravel appears to be composed of rolled materials, which no doubt have been brought to this place from some distance. It comprehends a mixture of red sand and gravel, ferruginous and ochraceous nodules; blue clay, peat, sulphur, loam, flints, pebbles, masses of granite, porphry, fragments of and whole bones, and is much mineralized by iron.
These rocks are traceable to a considerable distance beyond Cromer.
The immediate bed upon which the strata rests appears to be
Chalk.
This is met with about half a mile north-west of Mundsley, about low water mark, and for upwards of a mile forms the beach. Near Trimingham three very remarkable protuberances, which rise up and form a part of lofty cliffs. Further northward, masses of chalk are included in the drift, or crop out in the interior, at a short distance from the shore, as at Overstrand, near Cromer, where a pit has been worked, in which the chalk is in a very disturbed and shattered state. At Cromer, the chalk has been again detected, and is every where the fundamental rock, lying about the level of low water, and rising on the north of that town, to the height of some yards above the level. At Sherringham it ascends above high water mark, and enters largely, from thence to Weybourne, into the strata of the cliffs.
From the appearance then of so much chalk in the immediate neighbourhood, and some of it apparently in an undisturbed state, as may be seen by its horizontal layers of flint at Sherringham, beyond doubt its existence may be concluded both to the east as well as the north.