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THE SILTING UP OF THE DEE: ITS CAUSE. 53 
years ago caused bore holes to be made through the reclaimed 
land near the Higher Ferry, when it was found that the 
“‘sea-sand”” was 24 yards deep. The time required to deposit 
this great thickness of sand in the bed of the Dee would carry 
us far back beyond the period of the Romans, to the commence- 
ment of the silting up of its estuary. Before, therefore, the date 
of this, and indeed long after it was in progress, our city was 
situated on an arm of the sea, in which the salt water was ever 
present, and the- river entered this creek through the rocky 
channel between the Castle and Handbridge. This creek from 
Hilbre to Chester was not so wide in Roman times as it is now, 
because we find the remains of peat with tree stumps standing 
up 7 situ on the shore near Dawpool; and again on the Little 
Hye near Hilbre peat occurs, and in this latter place it (the peat) 
yields Roman and Saxon relics, proving it to have been a land 
surface within the historic period. A tract of land, some mile 
in width and six miles in length, has, within comparatively recent 
times, been swept away between Hilbre Island and Heswall, 
near Parkgate; and how much more, there is no evidence to 
show, beyond the fact that the high cliffs of boulder-clay along 
the Dawpool shore are being rapidly worn away by the rain, the 
frost, and the tide. 
THE GEOLOGICAL HISTORY OF THE DEE. 
On the termination of the Glacial Period, the present land rose 
out of the sea, when the beds of boulder-clay and sand (the 
remnants of which form the banks on either side) stretched 
across the present estuary of the Dee from the Cheshire to the 
Flintshire shore. _The River Dee then probably cut its channel 
midway between Cheshire and Flintshire. At the beginning of 
its geological history the Dee would quickly cut its course, but 
as it cut its channel deeper and deeper from Bala to the sea, 
the fresh-water stream would become less powerful, the tidal 
waters of the sea would overcome the action of the river, and 
commence the widening of the mouth from the sea inland. 
Hence the fact that the estuary is six miles wide at Hoylake, 
tapering to a point at Chester—some twenty miles distant as the 
crow flies. That was the period of the scooping out of Sealand, 
then followed the filling in—the tidal waters of the sea began to 
be glutted with sediment which it could not take away, and the 
fresh waters of the river were powerless to remove it; hence the 
formation of the great.East and West Hoyle Banks at the 
entrance of this creek or arm of the sea, which play a very 
important part on the tidal action of the estuary. 
THE RECENT SILTING UP. 
I shall now, however, dismiss the remote past, and come to 
E 
