12 GEOLOGICAL STRUCTURE 



plateau above Selbourne, across Woolmer Forest, to 

 this same valley of Harting Combe. 



Unlike all the formations which cover it, the Wealden 

 is a fresh-water deposit, or one which was formed at 

 the mouth of some great marshy river, inasmuch as it 

 only contains shells of fresh-water origin, and fragments 

 of bones which belonged to great aquatic and ter- 

 restrial lizards. It is the upper portion only, however, 

 of the vast deposit, which, having this character, and 

 occupying the larger portion of the Wealden of Sussex, 

 Surrey, and Kent, has its nether termination in Harting 

 Combe. All the lower part, consisting of alternations 

 of sands and clays, constitutes what was formerly called 

 the Hastings Sands ; and in their range to Crow- 

 borough Beacon and Pevensey Bay they are marked 

 at intervals by strong bands of sandstone, as at 

 Horsham, Tunbridge Wells, Hastings, &c. 



This whole series, from the base to the summit, is 

 eminently ferruginous ; and even in the little nook of 

 Harting Combe, as at Lynch and Redford, when I 

 first examined the tract in 1824, the old slag of the 

 iron furnaces was used as a road material having 

 been found where the ore was smelted with the charcoal 

 resulting from the burning of the wild forests of this 

 " Anderida " of the Romans. 



The uppermost or purely argillaceous member of the 

 Wealden, particularly where the valley widens between 

 the promontories of Green sandstone of Black Down 

 on the north and Holder and Bexley Hills on the 

 south (points all visible from the hills of Up Park), is 

 characterized by containing at intervals the shelly 

 limestone called Petworth Marble, and in which the 

 shells of the Paludina fluviorum are often covered with 

 layers of compact clay or shale, replete with the minute 

 white bivalve crustacean called cypres faba. 



It would lead me too far from the interest attached 

 to the parish of Harting and its immediate neighbour- 

 hood to discourse at greater length on the structure of 



