571.14 89 



I. 



Worked Flints from the Cromer Forest Bed. 



FOR the benefit of those not famiHar with the geology of the Cromer 

 district, I may, perhaps, be allowed to give the following 

 particulars : — The valley to the west of Cromer, towards Sherringham, 

 is still cloaked with a palaeolithic gravel, which sometimes attains a 

 thickness of eight or ten feet, and forms the summit of the cliffs. It 

 is of light-brown colour generally, and implements of well-known 

 palaeolithic forms have been found in it for the last twenty years. 

 They are well made, well finished, highly patinated, and only very 

 lightly iron-stained, of an even uniform light-brown colour ; calling 

 strongly to mind the general facies of the Stanton Downham 

 palaeoliths. Flint flakes are also found in the gravel ; and occasion- 

 ally an implement gets washed out and falls upon the beach, where 

 naturally it gets knocked about. But let the abrasive and destructive 

 beach-action be what it may, the implements still retain their type 

 and colour, and worked flints from this bed can readily be distinguished 

 from those derived from the underlying deposits. 



Below this gravel come the fantastically twisted and folded 

 Glacial beds, appropriately termed the contorted drift, now sweeping 

 in a low, long graceful wave, such as one would see in mid-ocean on 

 the surface of the Atlantic, and now, amidst countless undulations of 

 indescribable paths, trending almost vertically for from thirty to 

 forty feet ; then perhaps descending just as quickly, embracing a 

 column of white or reddish brown material, which a lens reveals to be 

 the old Crag or Cromer Forest Bed torn up in this fell swoop, push, 

 or slide, and crushed to powder. In other places the contained fossils 

 are less crushed, and frequently fragments are left of sufficient size 

 for specific determination, especially when the torn-up mass is large, 

 as some of them are ; indeed, in the case of the great chalk islands, 

 some of them are from two to three hundred yards long, and are now 

 quarried for lime burning. But size and weight appear to have been 

 nothing to the forces which operated during the formation of these 

 remarkable deposits, as these huge masses of chalk were picked up, 

 rolled over, and stuck on end, apparently as easily as the fragments of 

 Forest Bed were carried up to the top of the cliff". Some amount of 

 care is therefore necessary in reading the beds exposed in these cliffs. 

 But all the abnormally violent action had ceased before the incoming 

 of the comparatively peaceful conditions, under which the palaeolithic 



