83 



NOTES ON SOME PLEISTOCENE MOLLUSCA 

 IN NORTH HUNTINGDONSHIRE. 



By Rev. C. E. Y. KENDALL, B.A. 



(Read before the Society, March 12th, 1913). 



At Woodston, in North Huntingdonshire, are many large brick- 

 works which find their material in that vast bed of Oxford Clay which 

 lies to the south of the River Nene at Peterborough. During the 

 work of excavation some little time ago the " steam-navvy " exposed 

 in one of these workings a section of an ancient river or lake bed, 

 which has been described locally as the Buried River. This so-called 

 Buried River traverses the beds of Oxford Clay for some considerable 

 distance in a direction roughly from north-west to south-east, as 

 borings made in the neighbourhood have shown, but its actual area 

 and boundaries remain at present undefined. The bed of the river 

 (or lake) lies roughly at a depth of 40 to 50 feet below the existing 

 level of the land and consists at the bottom of a mass, many feet in 

 thickness, of rubble and boulders lying in and through the " knotts " 

 as the brick-clay is termed locally. The actual ancient water-space is 

 filled in with a variety of sands, marls, clays and gravels which will be 

 described in detail later on, these forming a mass roughly from 25 to 

 30 feet in thickness. As the material which has filled in the old bed 

 is useless for the making of bricks, fresh workings have been opened 

 up in the solid Oxford Clay beyond its limits and the exposed faces 

 of two sections of the old bed remain in an ideal condition for 

 geological investigation. 



My own researches into the contents of the marls in this ancient 

 river-bed were made in the first place for the purpose of establishing 

 some data as to the probable climatic conditions in the days when 

 the deposit was laid down, and also as to the probable origin of the 

 deposit, whether fluviatileor lacustrine. But the results have been so 

 surprising from a conchological point of view that I have been amply 

 rewarded for a good deal of somewhat laborious work and have 

 collected certain facts which will, I believe, be of very considerable 

 interest to my fellow conchologists. For this deposit has afforded me 

 up to the present time 53 species of the non-marine mollusca, of which 

 28 are terrestrial species and 25 fresh-water species, giving a most 

 unusual proportion of the land-shells. Moreover of the species found 

 in this deposit no less than seven are now extinct in the British Isles, 

 and of these one — a Paludestrina — appears to be new to science. 

 Of the others Clausilia ventricosa Drap. and CI. parvula Stud, have 



