/. E. Taylor — On the Drift near Norwich. 509 



Boulder-clay dropped into it. The diameter of the furrow was 

 about a hundred yards. On each side the sands were twisted and 

 contorted, as though they had been acted upon by some moving 

 mass, and thrown out of their original position. The Boulder-clay 

 at Harford Bridges evidently rests on the disturbed Chalk, which 

 comes up a little nearer Norwich, on the same side of the river. 

 This bed cannot be more than two or three hundred yards in breadth, 

 and it also has a north-easterly extension. On the higher grounds 

 of Trowse and Bixley, the Upper Boulder-clay may again be seen 

 resting on the disturbed Chalk, although less than a quarter of a 

 mile away, in the same line of high ground, there is a pit where 

 the Crag is developed, with the pebble-beds and clays overlying it, 

 the whole resting on the hard and undisturbed Chalk. Mr. Searles 

 Wood, in a paper read before the British Association at Norwich, last 

 year, stated what he called an " anomalous structure in the Upper 

 Grlacial beds." This was that the true Boulder-clay in the centre of 

 Norfolk has been deposited in a great trough more than twenty miles 

 in breadth. It is evident that this has no connection with the minor 

 phenomena I have endeavoured to describe, although this great sheet 

 also is let down on the Chalk. Such an extensive result may, how- 

 ever, be directly connected with the general glaciation of the Norfolk 

 Chalk-beds. 



At Drayton, about three miles from Norwich, and again at Attle- 

 bridge, about four miles further, the same phenomenon of the 

 grooving of the Lower Drift-beds and the deposition of the Boulder- 

 clay in the hollow, may also be seen, although here the surface of 

 the country must have suffered considerable denudation since it oc- 

 curred. In none of these instances is the width of the Boulder-clay 

 deposit more than a few hundred yards. Another phenomenon 

 seems to have more or less of a connection with those I have de- 

 scribed. Close by the patch of Boulder-clay at Swainsthorpe, and on 

 the same general level, the re-deposited Chalk crops up, and the flint 

 bands may be seen contorted and dragged up into an angle of nearly 

 sixty degrees. At Whitlingham, between the patches of Boulder- 

 clay, lying out of their true places at Thorpe and Trowse, there is a 

 fine section showing the flint bands in the disturbed Chalk thrown 

 into quite an anticlinal axis, although a few hundred yards to the 

 right and left of the same bed, thej^ are in almost their original hori- 

 zontality. It would seem as if the agent which had furrowed and 

 displaced the Lower Drift-beds, and caused the Upper to be de- 

 posited in the hollow, had also dragged up and twisted the flint- 

 bands in the Chalk along its course, just as I have mentioned its 

 having contorted the sand-beds in the railway cutting. The occur- 

 rence of the two phenomena so near together is certainly suggestive. 

 If the Upper Boulder-clay was formed under glacial-marine condi- 

 tions, the stranding of icebergs must have been of frequent occur- 

 rence, so that phenomena like those I have mentioned only prove the 

 general fact. Thus viewed, these seeming anomalies fall into their 

 proper places, and complete the evidence of the semi-arctic cii-cum- 

 stances under which some of the Drift-beds of Norfolk were accu- 

 mulated. 



