NOTES ON THE GRAVEL IN EPPING FOREST. 75 



'■'■Forest Hotel,''' Cliiiigford. A short distance east of the 

 "Forest Hotel," and on the southern side of the road, a gravel 

 pit was dug last summer. To about 6 feet from the surface the beds 

 consist of brown, clayey-sand, with a few scattered pebbles of rolled 

 flint. The uppermost 2 feet of this sand had weathered to a grey 

 colour. Below this clayey-sand a good pebble-bed was found, 

 about 8 feet thick, and of similar composition to that of the two 

 other beds ; the larger flints and drift rocks being at the lowest 

 depth, as in the " Earl's Path " pit. 



Buckhurst Hill. The gravel pits behind the "Roebuck Inn" 

 contain only small rolled flints, without quartz or quartzite, as 

 far as I have been able to observe ; and the pits seemed to have 

 produced nothing else but this kind of gravel since they were noted 

 by Professor Prestwich, who refers to them as Bagshot. 



The Gravel in the Forest lies very irregularly, the hollows in the 

 London Clay which it fills varying from i or 2 feet to nearly 20 feet 

 in depth. Thus, while the pit near the "Forest Hotel," at Chingford, 

 shows about 14 feet of gravel, on the north side of the road a few 

 yards distant water, marking the nearness of the underlying clay, is 

 seen at a depth of 4 feet. 



In the " Proceedings of the Geologists' Association," for August, 

 1891 (vol. xii., p. 108), Messrs Monckton and Herries in an inter- 

 esting paper on some " Hill Gravels North of the Thames," call 

 attention to the "hollows" in the London Clay, alluded to above, 

 but I think the deeper sections to which I have referred have been 

 opened since. 



In addition to the quartz and quartzite already named, there are 

 some pieces of grit and also of very hard black flinty rock, much 

 worn. Mr. Clement Reid very kindly examined some of the 

 specimens I have collected, and he is of opinion that they belong to 

 the Northern Drift. As yet no Boulder Clay seems to have been 

 exposed in what now constitutes the Forest district, though Mr. 

 T. A\ Holmes has found it further south at Hornchurch.- These 

 foreign rocks of Epping Forest are similar to those in the Drift at 

 Hatfield Heath, Chelmsford, etc , but the masses of veined quartz 

 and hard block-flint are not quite so large. 



2 Essex Nat. (vol. vii., pp. 1-14). 



