56 Horace T. "Brown — Boring at Stratford-on-Avon. 



Apart altogether from the question of water supply there are 

 several points of considerable interest about this Stratford-on-Avon 

 boring to which I must call attention. 



In the first place it is noteworthy that the transition from the Lower 

 into the Upper Keuper facies is much more abrupt than it is in 

 Staffordshire, Leicestershire, Nottinghamshire, and other localities ia 

 which I have had an opportunity of examining the junction. As 

 a rule there is nothing like a sharp line of demarcation between 

 these two subdivisions of the Trias the Marls gradually becoming 

 more predominant as we trace the beds upwards, and the Sandstones 

 as we trace them downwards. The line of junction in mapping the 

 beds in most parts of the country is always a more or less arbitrary 

 one, but here at Stratfoi'd the transition from Lower to Upper 

 Keuper is remarkably sharp, the "passage beds " (Nos. 22-25) with 

 alternations of Marls and Sandstones, only occupying a thickness 

 of 19 feet. 



To the north and north-west of Stratford, in the neighbourhood of 

 Henley in Arden, there is marked on the Survey maps the outcrop 

 of certain beds of sandstone to which Mr. Howell called attention in 

 1859 in his Survey Memoir on the Warwickshire Coalfield. He 

 describes these as consisting of from 15 to 20 feet of white micaceous 

 sandstones, alternating with bands of green marl, and further states that 

 they occur at about 250 feet from the top of the Ked Marls and 350 

 feet from their base. About 29 feet of very hard thin micaceous and 

 calcareous sandstones, corresponding to this description, were passed 

 through in the Stratford-on-Avon boring between 290 and 319 feet 

 from the base of the Upper Keuper, which is remarkably close to 

 the position assigned to the the Upper Keuper Sandstone by Mr. 

 Howell. The few fragments which were brought up by the boring 

 tools were searched for Estheria minuta but without success. 



Whether this 29 feet of Upper Keuper Sandstones is anything 

 more than of local significance is uncertain, but there can be no 

 doubt of the striking lithological similarity of the beds to certain 

 thin sandstones of the Upper Keuper in Worcestershire, Staffordshire, 

 and Nottinghamshire, and it is quite possible that when we have 

 a complete re-survey of the Trias some of the beds of these various 

 disti'icts may be correlated. If this turns out to be the case we shall 

 have, what is now sadly wanted by workers in the Trias, some 

 definite horizons in the Upper Keuper to which observations can be 

 referred with certainty. 



The results of the Stratford boring have an important bearing on 

 the question of the thinning out of the secondary rocks against the 

 palaeozoic east and west ridge which we have reason to believe 

 underlies the secondai'y rocks of the southern counties. As far back as 

 1859 it was pointed out bj r Professor Hull, in a mernoir on the South- 

 Easterly Attenuation of the Lower Secondary formations of England 

 (Jour. Geol. Soc. xvi, 68), that the direction of maximum attenua- 

 tion of the Triassic rocks is along a line drawn S.E. from the 

 estuary of the Dee, and passing near Nantwich, Stafford, and 

 Warwick. In his subsequent Survey Memoir on the Triassic and 



