C.—GEOLOGY 77 
be claimed is that the marginal strip of coalfield between the crest of the 
Rearers Anticline and the Red Rock Fault was dragged down as the basin 
deepened. The Rearers Fold or Western Anticline of Staffordshire is 
interpreted as an acute upfolding of an extension from the Longmynd. 
Within the coalfield, mining has proved that the coal seams rise and fall 
transversely across it 1,500 ft. within three miles, and that where the fold 
is asymmetrical the slight overturn is towards the west. Where, by 
Astbury, the convergence at the Red Rock Fault brings Trias against 
D2 limestone, the eastward drop into the Biddulph trough introduces 
5,000 ft. of measures within two miles. The divergent Eastern or Endon 
anticline is a part of the gentler north-eastward rise out of the Potteries 
Coalfield trough towards Derbyshire, and is defined eastward by the 
steep-sided shallow syncline of Rudyard and the narrow flat-bottomed 
Shaffalong Coalfield. The main trough of Staffordshire pitches a little 
to the west of south at about 500 ft. per mile, but powerful north-west 
faults make the pitch only partially effective. In fifteen miles the coalfield 
widens southward from one to fifteen miles, and within its gape there is, 
about Newcastle and Trentham, already 5,000 ft. of Productive Measures 
overlain by more than 2,000 ft. of Upper Coal Measures. Within North 
Staffordshire, Trias transgresses and is banked against every member of 
the Carboniferous series, and is itself quite steeply tilted by secondary 
uplift of the Rearers and other anticlines. 
The southward pitching of the Potteries downfold is towards Newport 
and the East Shropshire Coalfield. Inlying outcrops of red Upper Coal 
Measures follow the line of the Rearers fold towards the Longmynd, but 
spread also eastwards towards Lilleshall, where a sharp uprise of the 
Wrekin ridge brings up Cambrian and Carboniferous Limestone, and the 
only suggestion of closure of the Stafford-Shropshire basin includes the 
great oval of ‘Trias and Upper Coal Measures which extends forty miles 
south to Kidderminster and Bewdley, with Stafford and Wolverhampton 
on its eastern side. In this downfold, as in the southern half of the 
Cheshire Basin, the Upper Coal Measures are thick, but development 
from the deep pits already working out westwards from the Black Country 
is evidence that almost all its deep downfolding is subsequent to the 
deposition of the Productive Measures. 
The South Staffordshire or Black Country Coalfield is essentially a 
twenty mile long, four to eight miles wide, flat-topped, north-south ridge 
or plateau, tilted slightly towards the south and diversified with minor 
ridges and hollows, which are re-awakened pre-Carboniferous structures. 
From the trend of its minor folds and bounding faults one may guess that 
it lines up with the Eastern (Endon) anticline of North Staffordshire, and 
that the pitch which brings up limestone under Trias north of Cannock 
is responsible for the ending of the coalfield there. 
As the Black Country is a plateau, so the Lichfield-Birmingham Trias 
area is a steep-sided downfold several thousands of feet deep, widening 
southwards and flanked towards the east by the rise to the Warwickshire 
Coalfield. Possibly this is the trough of the Cheadle Coalfield continued 
southward under the Rhetic outlier of Abbots Bromley, but a local rise 
of pitch allows rocks older than the Trias to appear at surface between 
