147 



present. Dr. Lycett, in his excellent little book, "The Geology 

 of the Cotteswold Hills" (1857), concurred in this view, and he 

 has given a section of the valley at Brimscombe, in which there 

 is a bed of Angular Gravel at Hyde, at a high level, and a bed 

 of river Gravel in the bottom of the valley. 



In a paper, read in 1866, on the denudabion of the Cottes- 

 wolds, I alluded to the Angiilar Gravel, and suggested that it 

 was formed of oolitic detritus disintegrated by frost, washed 

 down by streams, and deposited in positions which at that period 

 were the bottoms of the valleys then in com-se of being excavated. 



Mr. Lucy's paper followed soon afterwards, in which he 

 describes the Gravel as generally found at the foot of the 

 Inferior Oolite, or resting upon the upper Lias sands, in all 

 cases running up to a point where the combe rises at a consi- 

 derable angle. That it is composed of the freestone of the 

 Inferior Oolite, withoiat any fossils or even recent shells. His 

 impression was that it was attributable to frozen snow or land 

 ice, which, when the thaw set in, would slip down, carrying 

 with it the detritus of the freestone, and was of the age when 

 the climate had become comparatively mild. 



Some of these opinions have undergone considerable modifi- 

 cation, and we may dismiss that which refers to sea beaches as 

 abandoned. 



The " heaps of rubbish " alluded to in the above quotation 

 from the " Geology of Cheltenham," are, in my opinion, due to 

 the tumbling and slipping of masses of Inferior Oolite, which 

 were afterwards disintegrated by frost, and converted into 

 detritus, rather than to the action of storm waters, or to snow 

 and land ice. 



The suggestion in my owu paper, so far at least as it relates 

 to the age of the gravel, is not in accordance with more recently 

 obsei*ved facts. For instance, at Longford's Lake, near Nails- 

 worth, the Gravel pit which the Club examined on the occasion 

 of the Meeting at Nailsworth in 1868, and to which attention 

 was called by Mr. G. F. Playne, showed the Angular Gravel 

 overlying the river gravel, and therefore a more recent deposit ; 

 but the position of this gravel bed clearly proves that since its 



