504 F. R. Cowper Reed—The Coast of Waterford. 
At this point the reddish clay is succeeded by a sharply marked off band 
of greyish clay 13-2 feet thick, characterised by containing numerous 
angular fragments of black or greenish slate, mostly small, but scarcely 
any fragments of Old Red Sandstone. Northwards this slaty deposit 
assumes a definitely bedded character with a sandy or marly matrix, 
at the same time increasing in thickness till about half-way between 
Raheen and the Cable Station it is quite 5 feet thick, with the upper 
part composed of rather large angular fragments 4—8 inches long of 
banded purple and green slates lying flat and horizontal with little 
finer matrix between them, the lower portion, however, still consisting 
of smaller and more scattered chips of slate in bedded sandy clay. 
Boulder-clay, 1-2 feet thick, of somewhat variable character, lies 
beneath it, resting directly on the platform without the intervention 
of any true ‘head,’ but here and there a thin black layer, 
2-3 inches thick, full of small rounded pebbles and angular chips 
of slate cemented together, adheres to the platform, and seems to be 
a local modification of Messrs. Wright & Muff’s ‘ferricrete.’ The 
bedded slaty deposit thins out before we reach the Cable Station, and 
the Boulder-clay forms the whole cliff 30-40 feet high. Thin bands 
of reddish or ochreous clay 2—4 inches thick can here and there be 
distinguished near the base of the cliffs in the Boulder-clay, but only 
persist for a few yards. The rubble drift on the top of the cliffs is 
usually thin, but rests on a somewhat irregular surface of Boulder-clay. 
Landslips and vegetation much obscure the section beyond the Cable 
Station, but the cliffs steadily decrease in height, owing to the 
reduction in thickness of the Boulder-clay, and below Crooke Chapel 
they are only 6-8 feet high. About 100 yards north of Crooke the 
solid rock of the old platform appears on the beach close under the low 
cliffs, being disclosed in patches between the shingle; it consists of 
greenish-grey and sea-green shales, slates and flags in thin alternating 
layers; soft purple shales and fine-grained purple flags are intercalated 
a little further north in beds } inch to 8 inches thick, alternating with 
the greenish beds. These all dip regularly at 80° in a general 
northerly direction or are vertical. The Boulder-clay apparently rests 
directly on this platform, but the latter soon is lost to sight, and our 
interest is concentrated on the cliffs, which begin to increase in height, 
and in which the Boulder-clay, capped by about 2 feet of rubble drift 
and subsoil, is remarkable for the large number of huge boulders 
imbedded in it. Many of these are of non-local rocks (granites, 
quartzites, etc.), and these are more or less rounded and reach a size 
of as much as 23-4 feet in length. The masses of the Old Red 
Sandstone breccia are angular and even larger in size. 
A most varied series of the non-local rocks can be easily collected 
out of the Boulder-clay here, and the beach is strewn with similar 
boulders of all sizes derived from the cliffs. About nine-tenths of the 
larger blocks are of the local Old Red Sandstone beds, but examples of 
the Ordovician rocks, igneous and sedimentary, of co. Waterford itself 
(ie. of the country to the west) are remarkably rare. 
A few blocks of the felsites and other igneous rocks (especially the 
nodular perlitic felsite of Raheen gap) have been drifted up-stream 
from Newtown Head, but only occur on the beach and not in the 
