357 



Yet what has the antiquarian been able to do beyond rescuing the merest 

 relics ot a few hundred years? And it is here that the geologist steps in with 

 evidence that the archaeologist would without his aid have been unable to unfold. 

 The Wye, which now rolls along so steadily, is one of the many witnesses we 

 summon for our geological evidence of the antiquity of the past. There is no 

 geologist, who has studied the alluvial deposits of the Wye as it flows in its 

 present geological position, who can doubt for one moment that it has flowed 

 within its present rock boundaries for unnumbered ages. It has altered its channel 

 since the days of Wilton Castle, no doubt, as suggested by Dr. Strong. In the 

 course of ages, it has deposited and destroyed and reconstructed its alluvium 

 over the alluvial plains again and again ; but I finally agree with Mr. Richardson 

 that there is every proof, from the study of the alluvial deposits of this river, 

 that it has flowed for unnumbered ages between its present boundary of the Old 

 Red rocks of Ross and the Mountain Limestone gorges of Symonds Yat. 



And yet there was a time, remote, indeed, as far as our human capacities of 

 time reckoning aid us, but recent in a geological sense, when the Wye flowed at 

 a far higher level than at present, and deposited its beds of gravel and shingle 

 far above the deposits of alluvium laid down by the existing river. The old 

 Castle of Clifford, near Hay, stands, and has stood for centuries, upon one of the 

 old river beds. "An ancient Castle on a hill," the hill consisting of the debris 

 washed down by a Wye which flowed sixty feet above the plains the present 

 river washes. It was, probably, in this period when the old rivers of Hereford- 

 shire flowed at these higher levels, that the ancient human race existed, whose 

 implements were deposited in the drifts of the Somme Valley in France, and 

 Bedford and other localities in England, a time when man was contemporary 

 with numbers of extinct quadrupeds, the mammoth, the rhinoceros, the hippo- 

 potamus, and the cave bear ; a period when England was a part of the continent 

 of Europe, and before the island configuration of Great Britain was accomplished 

 by the denudation of the boulder clay and silts which must have once filled our 

 straits, and constituted the lands over which the extinct animals and ancient men 

 once crossed, and recrossed long, long ago. 



And here it may be asked whether the geologist possesses any evidence as 

 to '.he time or period when the great gorges of the Wye between Symonds Yat 

 and the Great Doward were excavated. In replying to this question, I must 

 carry you back to a still more remote epoch in geological time. 



There was a period well known to geologists as the glacial period, when by 

 far the larger portion of Great Britain was submerged beneath the sea. During 

 the maximum of this epoch, all the highest hills of Herefordshire were, without 

 doubt, submerged, and over their summits floated ice rafts and icebergs, bearing 

 burdens of rifted masses of rock, which were dropped, as the ice bearers melted, 

 on the sea rocks and beds over which they floated. 



I have seen numerous examples all around Herefordshire and South Wjiles, 

 which I have not time to mention now ; it must suffice to say that everywhere I 



