44 baker's north Yorkshire. 



level. Not only are they distributed through the central valley 

 and borne to the foot of the Hambleton Hills and the Wolds, 

 but also carried as far as Holderness, Scarborough, and other parts 

 of the coast-hne. Naturally the main current passed over what 

 was even then the lowest part of the ridge and swept down the 

 Stainmoor hollow. 



At times the flow towards the south-east, on reaching our 

 eastern coasts, was diverted to the south-west by contact with a 

 yet greater ice-sheet. This, proceeding from Scandinavia, filled 

 the North Sea, occasionally encroaching even upon the present 

 coast-line. Hence the soil of those parts has been in part 

 supplied from Norway. The great central plain has also received 

 contributions from the Lias and Oolite to the east and north- 

 east, plainly showing that the ice-field from the Hambletons, 

 when backed by the gigantic masses from Scandinavia, were 

 at times more than a match for the prevailing streams from the 

 north-west. In the most southern part of our district chalk, 

 also, begins to form a constituent of this most heterogeneous 

 subsoil, although it is only when we get still further south that 

 it really becomes of importance. 



The result of this inundation, so far as our field of study is 

 concerned, has been an extensive and long continued denuda- 

 tion of the upraised and softer portions of the surface and the 

 deposition of what was thus swept away in irregular beds over 

 the valleys. Everywhere, in the shape of confused heaps of 

 gravel and clay and sand, this glacial deposit covers the lower 

 levels of the surface. On the sea-coast we have it on the cliff 

 tops, and in some places, as for instance between Redcar and 

 Saltburn, between Sandsend and Whitby, and about the Spa at 

 Scarborough, a sea bank which rises up to a height of loo or 

 even 200 feet above high-water mark is entirely composed of it. 

 In the interior of the country over an area of -six hundred square 

 miles these deposits of the glacial epoch almost entirely hide 

 from view the New Red Sandstones of the Central Valley and 

 the Oolite Clays of the Vale of Pickering. 



