THE ASHFIELD LAKE, 601 



River, wliicli has out a deep passageway thi-ough them. The small river 

 o'oes Dii tor a mile north in a deep, sandless, bowlder-strewn valley to join 

 the Deei-fielil. 



It is j)laiu that the ice dammed this valley and that the sands were 

 heaped up against it, and that it then retreated and left the sands to cave 

 into the great northward-facing scarjJ after the changes in the ice farther 

 up the Deerlield River had opened up other channels of escape for the 

 waters. 



THE ASHFIELD LAKE. 



The great bodies of flat sands in the middle of Ashfield (middle of PI. 

 XXXV, A) have naturally, in this extremely hilly country, given the vil- 

 lage the n;une of Ashfield Plains. The Ashfield Lake is represented by a 

 peculiar body of sand surrounding" a great rocky hill which overlooks the 

 -spillage. At South Ashfield it turned west and drained down a long valley 

 to the east into Comvay, and from this point I was uncertain as to its 

 course. The valley it has followed to this point (South River Yalle}-) runs 

 east into the Conway Lake. It is empty of sands for a mile, and then 

 begin deposits which are continuous into the Conway Lake. 



The Ashfield beds seem to turn south just at the town line, up a liranch 

 of the South River, whose valley they fill for a long way south, to the 

 southwest corner of the Greenfield quadrangle, and then repeat the opera- 

 tion already described at the north end of Bear River Lake (p. 600). 

 The valley in which we are following up the deposits ends in a cul-de- 

 sac, but is continued southward at a much higher level by two valleys, 

 one of which runs through a corner of Plainfield and along the east of 

 Moores Hill, in Goshen, in a nan-ow can^'on, and thence down the steep 

 slope into AVilliamsburg Lake, and the other more directly south, by City 

 Pond, into the -s-alley of Mill River, and into the same lake. I have 

 represented the deposits in disconnected patches in both these courses, 

 because much of the way the valleys are so narrow that all traces of these 

 earlier occupants have been swept out by the wild floods of the present 

 brooks. It is, of course, probable that the Williamsburg Lake came iiito 

 existence as soon as the ice melted back from it, and that, as the ice 

 retreated, the two courses I have last traced were long used by waters at 

 various stages of this retreat. I am here, however, following out the last 

 occupation liefore the opening of the Deerfield River. 



