on fJ?e 



of 



By J. 0. MANSEL PLEYDELL, Esq., P.G.S. 



El !] physical features of the Isle of Portland and 

 neighbourhood have long attracted attention* 

 Delabeche, Buckland, Prestwich, Cooke, Godwin- 

 Austen, Bristow, Whittaker, Osmond Fisher, 

 Damon, and others have laboriously worked to 

 elucidate the phenomena of the Chesil Bank, the raised beach 

 and drifts of the neighbourhood. In 1853 Mr. Coode, now 

 Sir John Coode, read a paper before the Institution of Civil 

 Engineers, in which he describes the Chesil Bank as a vast 

 mound shingle, in the form uf a narrow isthmus, lying upon the 

 west sea-board of Dorsetshire between Abbotsbury and Port- 

 land, its general bearing or direction being south-east, and its 

 length lOf miles commencing at Abbotsbury Castle (to the 

 westward of which the shingle slopes down from the low 

 cliffs, as in the case of an ordinary beach), the Bank skirts along 

 the margin of the meadows for half a mile, when it meets the 

 Fleet or Backwater, a shallow estuary varying from half to a 

 quarter of a mile in width ; it then runs parallel to the 

 general line of the main land as far as Wyke, a distance of 

 eight miles ; from this point the Bank takes a more southerly 

 direction until it joins the peninsula, or what is more commonly 

 called the Isle of Portland, when it assumes the character of an 

 ordinary beach. The width of its base at the level of low water 



