Q74 Sir H. H. Howorth—North Norfolk Geology— 
sections displayed in the Survey Memoirs show, by the vast long cakes 
of chalk containing flints, which have been ridiculously called chalk 
boulders, and which, as I have said, have been the puzzle of every 
inquirer, and the cause of many fantastic theories on the part of 
those who dislike induction but love paradox and sensation in science. 
In the sections illustrating the geology of Cromer cliffs attached to 
the memoir on the geology of Cromer, these long cakes of chalk 
between East aud West Runton gap are duly represented, although 
on much too small a scale to show their real features. In the stretch 
of cliff between West Runton and the brickyard in Beeston cliff there 
is a particularly interesting and notable enclosure in the drift which is 
not noticed in the sections in question, nor, so far as I know, in the 
literature on the subject. It may be that it has only recently been 
exposed in the cliff, but this seems very improbable. Like the tabular 
cakes of chalk just mentioned, this included mass is also remarkable 
for its great length and small thickness, but what makes it much ~ 
more notable is the disintegrated materials out of which it is composed. 
When I first saw it I was particularly puzzled, because I could see 
from the foot of the cliff only a long serpentinous line of chalk 
(true chalk and not made up) curved into a sinuous shape and 
extending for a great many yards, nowhere apparently more than 
a foot thick and thinning down to 4 or 5 inches. On climbing up 
the cliff I found that this enigmatical ribbon of chalk was covered 
with a stratum of hard pan formed of small flint pebbles and full of 
‘Weybourne Crag shell fragments, and over this again was a stratified 
bed of sandy and gravelly Crag, the whole united together and forming 
a continuous series of beds. The entire mass is more or less lenticular 
in shape in its thickest part, but stretches out on either side into 
a kind of ribbon and has been detached and transported en masse. 
Although the pebbles of flint are indurated by iron oxide, they are 
much more loose than elsewhere where the iron pan occurs at the 
foot of the cliff. There cannot be any doubt that we here have a case 
of a surface layer or rather skin of chalk haying been stripped off 
violently from the chalk matrix, and with it the usual covering of the 
chalk as it occurs when 7m sit% and undisturbed on the foreshore, 
that before it was moved this cake of mixed materials formed an integral 
part of the uppermost bed of the chalk with the Weybourne Crag 
attached, and that the detachment and portage of the whole mass took 
place after the deposition of the Weybourne or Norwich Crag. 
I ought to add that this remarkable cake of conjoined chalk and 
crag is matched in the case of the longer and better known tabular 
chalk masses between East and West Runton Gap. On portions of 
two of these the same bed of hard pan or consolidated gravel occurs. 
In these cases the gravel is represented in the sections of the Survey 
Memoir lying on the chalk, but its significance is entirely overlooked, 
and, mirabile dictu, the gravel is labelled glacial gravel. What there 
is glacial about it defies conjecture. It is formed of small rounded 
flint pebbles with occasional quartzites, like all the other gravels of the 
upper crag, and, so far as I know, of nothing else, and is the exact 
equivalent of the hard pan as it exists similarly planted upon the 
chalk when the latter occurs with the crag in juxtaposition along 
