424 THE CRETACEOUS SYSTEM. CHAP. 



siderably varied; but the sponges, so common at Faringdon, are 

 not noticed here. Terebratulse are numerous. In the lower beds 

 of the sand rolled fossils and bouldered masses derived from the 

 Kimmeridge clay are abundant. The ironstone was smelted in 

 ancient times. 



Passing now to Faringdon, we find that picturesque town seated 

 amidst banks of Coralline oolite and Kimmeridge clay, capped here 

 and there by sandy hills and broad floors of shelly gravels. In 

 the detached and dome-shaped hill called the ' Folly/ on the east 

 side of Faringdon, crowned by a conspicuous ' clump' of trees (510 

 feet above the sea), the sands are 100 feet thick, yellowish in colour 

 at the surface, and divided by concretionary beds of sandstone 

 and thin bands of ironstone. No fossils seen in the road sections, 

 or in an open pit in a low hill by the road to Stanford. 



Badbury Hill, west of Faringdon, and equal in height to the 

 Clump, is also composed of sands and sandstone, more or less 

 fossiliferous ; among these being wood and a fern leaf in the sand- 

 stone which caps the whole b . 



This hill is not an insulated outlier like Faringdon Folly, but 

 slopes obscurely down to the south, and expands in a broad dry 

 surface of sands and conglomerate resting on Kimmeridge clay 

 about the village of Coxwell. 



This is the tract which yields the celebrated fossiliferous gravel, 

 in large excavations begun in a flat tabular surface, to which the 

 beds of conglomerate and loose gravels, shells, and sand are nearly 

 conformed, much as in a district of ' crag/ to which these extensive 

 old shell and sponge beaches bear no small resemblance. 



In the largest of the pits about two acres of the rock gravel 

 and sands have been excavated part being in solid beds, one 

 surface often marked by a scattering of small oysters. These beds 

 when carefully examined are found to have a large nodular 

 structure occupying the whole thickness, the intervening spaces 

 being filled by the same materials not agglutinated. The layers 

 are generally parallel, dipping slightly to the east, without false 

 bedding. No clay bands, no layers of mere sand. The whole 

 stands, when cut down, vertically like a wall. The pebbles are of 

 quartz, metamorphic flinty slates of various hues, black, grey, and 

 greenish. 



b Austen, Geol. Journal, vi. p. 457 (1850). 



