The Chalk and its Dislocations. 273 
surface is very irregular and broken. This is immediately before it 
disappears entirely from the cliff, and where it is found only on the 
shore at its foot. 
The same irregularity in the surface contour of the chalk and the 
same broken and dislocated character of the same bed is found in the 
inland parts of the county, as has been shown by earlier writers 
whose observations I have collected in a previous memoir. 
This last conclusion is attested by the various borings for wells 
which have been sunk in Norfolk, and by the exposures of chalk in 
ehalk and marl pits. They show conclusively that the level at which 
chalk is reached in sinking varies very greatly, and varies in areas 
near one another, showing that it has been greatly disturbed and 
broken over a wide extent since it was deposited. Of this variation in 
depth at which the chalk is found in the county the Survey Memoirs 
afford ample evidence. The same conclusion is forthcoming again 
from the considerable number of great angular masses of detached 
chalk occurring among the drifts in various parts of the county, which 
in places are big enough to have permitted of chalk being quarried out 
of them; phenomena which have been noted by many observers, and 
the impressions to be drawn from which have been enlarged upon in 
my previous papers on the dislocation of the chalk in the Eastern 
Counties already referred to. In the country round Cromer and 
Sheringham I have lately again visited several of these pits. ‘There 
is a fine one behind the mill at Weybourne; another near the road in a 
cutting through the hill between Weybourne and Salthouse; another 
behind the hill east of Beeston Hill; another near the upper gate of 
Mr. Upcher’s park on the Holt road; a small one east of Cley, on the 
road to Sand; and more than one at Northrepps. In all these cases 
the irregularity of level at which the chalk occurs is remarkable. It 
is not easy to determine in many cases whether the chalk exists in a 
detached mass or forms the nucleus of the hillin which it is found, and 
has been merely raised up, but in either case the proof of some violent 
action is patent. 
The oceurrence of great masses of shelly Crag at Norwich, far from 
the sea and overlying the Chalk, and of other portions also at a 
considerable elevation in the Bure valley, shows even more forcibly 
how great has been the elevation and disturbance of the chalk in these 
latitudes since the Norwich or Weybourne Crag was deposited. 
The same conclusion follows inevitably from the conditions under 
which the vast cakes and huge angular masses of chalk occur in the 
drifts at Beeston, West Runton, and elsewhere, a phenomenon which 
has attracted the attention of geologists for a long time and been the 
cause of endless discussion. From Weybourne to near Sheringham 
nothing is more remarkable in the clifts than the scarcity of large 
flints or of masses of chalk in the clays and sands overlying the 
hard pan. So scarce are they that they may virtually be said not to 
exist at all except occasionally in the gravel sometimes capping the 
cliffs, and which is sometimes contained in pockets, more or less great, 
in hollows formed on the upper surface of the sands. 
East of Sheringham the whole condition of things is changed, and 
thence to Cromer the cliffs are marked in seyeral places, as the cliff 
DECADE V.—VOL. IVY.—=NO. VI. 18 
