VOL. XVII. (2) NORTH AND MID COTTESWOLDS 273 



to a much earlier phase of glaciation, and therefore have been 

 longer exposed to denudation. 



Land-Ice.— The view that the drift was distributed by 

 land-ice, which extended over the whole of the district/ is held 

 by few geologists. There are no signs of the passage of any of 

 the great ice-sheets over the Cotteswold uplands. Most of the 

 rocks are easily eroded, yet it is improbable that hard stony 

 clays, smoothed surfaces, striated boulders and other pheno- 

 mena associated with a glaciated region could have been 

 completely removed. 



It has been suggested that a lobe from the Chalky Boulder 

 Clay ice was prolonged into the Vale of Moreton' and Dr C. 

 Callaway considers that the Tangley section is " inexphcable 

 except as a product of ice-action. "^ 



While some of the Drift material of the Vale of Moreton 

 may have been transported by ice-sheets moving from the 

 north and east, it seems improbable that a lobe travelled some 

 distance from the main mass and then ascended about 200 feet 

 to the Stour-Evenlode watershed — assuming that the con- 

 tours in Glacial times were approximately the same as at 

 present. 



No traces of glaciation can be detected around Tangley, 

 the greatest elevation at which undoubted Drift pebbles and 

 .flints are found in situ. The Drift material at that place is 

 probably the oldest on the Cotteswolds, and appears to consist 

 of the remnants of Tertiary river gravels preserved in a cavern 

 fissure, but it is just possible that it may be due to a glaciation 

 of much greater antiquity than that credited with the transport 

 of the Vale of Moreton gravels. 



Connection with the eastern ice-sheets is supposed to be 

 indicated by the occurrence in the Moreton gravels of rocks 

 of the Charnwood type, and the occasional appearance of red 

 and white chalk and flints at various points between the Cottes- 

 wolds and Lincolnshire. Thus Buckland observed hard white 

 chalk at Ridhngton in Rutlandshire,* and Prof. P. F. Kendall 

 informs me that he has found pebbles of red chalk at North- 

 ampton. 



1 C/. Dr Wright, Proc. Cottesw. Nat. F C, vol. vii., p. 5. „ . t 



2 Geol. Mag. (1897) pp. 485-6. 3 Ibid. (1905) p. 218 : see also Harmer, Quart. Journ. 

 Geol. Soc, vol. Ixiii., pp. 499-500. 



4 Reiiqu. Diluv., p. 250. 



