104 PROCEEDINGS COTTESWOLD CLUB 1908 
district) some way up the Cotteswold escarpment. The Lias is suc- 
ceeded by Inferior Oolite, whose escarpment is the Cotteswold Hills. 
So, speaking approximately, east of Newent are the Neozoic rocks ; 
west, the Palzozoic. 
To come now to a more detailed consideration of the geology of 
the Newent district, where the succession of rocks is complete, the 
formations between the Triassic and the Pre-Cambrian systems are as 
follows: (Trias), Permian, Carboniferous (Coal-Measures and Car- 
boniferous Limestone), Old Red Sandstone, Silurian, Ordovician, 
Cambrian. In the Newent district, however, this complete sequence 
cannot be studied in any one locality: it is necessary to piece 
together the succession from facts derived from the study of many 
sections in many localities. Even then there are gaps. For example, 
Coal-Measures at Oxenhall rest upon Old Red Sandstone: there is no 
intervening Carboniferous Limestone. 
The question is, why is it necessary, in order to obtain an idea 
of the complete succession of the geological formations, to study 
many sections in many localities ; and why is there a gap between the 
Coal-Measures and the Old Red? 
We know from the study of certain other areas that the true 
position of the Carboniferous Limestone is between the Old Red and 
the Coal-Measures. Moreover, we also know that in certain areas 
between what may be called for convenience the ‘‘ Older ” and Upper 
Coal-Measures there is a break: the ‘‘ Older” Coal-Measures fre- 
quently show evidence of haying been much flexured and denuded 
previous to the formation of the Upper Coal-Measures, and what 
is more interesting still, we know that in some places those ‘‘ Older ” 
Coal-Measures have been wholly removed before the deposition of 
the Upper. 
The effects then, of some causes, according to the area, are the 
presence or absence of the Carboniferous Limestone ; the presence of 
a continuous sequence of Coal-Measures; the unconformable relation 
of the ‘‘ Older” to the Upper; and the absence of the ‘‘ Older ”’— 
the Upper in this case resting directly upon some rock of greater 
antiquity than the ‘* Older ” Coal-Measures. 
Now as to the causes. It is weil established that, after the 
time-of-formation of the ‘‘ Older’? Coal-Measures there was a period 
of great earth-crumpling. The rocks were thrown into anticlines and 
synclines, domes and basins, and the mountains and hills then pro- 
duced constitute what is known as the ‘‘ Hercynian System.” The 
anticlines and domes had their tops removed: whatever beds came 
within the sphere of erosion, went. But it was different in the 
synclines and basins; there the beds were preserved. 
In the Newent district, using this designation in a more extended 
sense, there are the remains of two great ridges that were produced 
in closing Carboniferous times—the Malvernian and the Woolhopian. 
Their axes meet in the dome-like May-Hill area, and have no doubt 
been the prime cause in the remarkable, and at first sight inexplicable, 
distribution of the rocks in the northern portion of that area around 
Aston Ingham and Clifford’s Mesne. 
