70 king: nellore PORTION of the carnatic. 



is worn out, leaving the shelving- lateritic grit and conglomerate. The 

 upper beds are highly ferruginous and indurated. The Nellore sections 

 disclose irregularly-deposited beds of yellowish-red and mottled ferru- 

 ginous clays, partly concretionary. There is not much pisolitic laterite 

 here ; it is merely a tolerably hard ferruginous gritty clay, much pierced 

 with small vermicular cavities, and there are traces o£ sandstone-like 

 beds or ferruginous clays full of minute angular pieces of quartz. Away 

 south of Nellore towards Survapali, the rock is more massive and even 

 pisolitic, like the laterite of the Trichinopoly and Tanjore districts, or is 

 often a conglomerate with rounded fragments of quartzite. 



The patches north of Nellore have a greater resemblance to the 

 More sandy to north Cuddalore sandstones of South Arcot and Tanjore, 

 of Nellore. j n fa^ ^hey show associated grits and sandstones. 



At Kovur the laterite is very gritty, passing distinctly into regular grits 

 and sandstones. The following section is exposed in a deep well close 

 to Kovur : — Uppermost a bed, about 15 feet in thickness, of mottled 

 reddish-yellow and brown clayey and sandy laterite, much pierced with 

 vermiform holes. Below this is a much coarser bed of clayey grits, with 

 very thin layers of semi-angular pebbles and gravel of quartz. This 

 bed is extremely coarse and pierced with large vermiform tubes. Aver- 

 age thickness about 10 feet. The thickness of the lower bed is concealed 

 by the water of the well ; it is a compact clayey grit, irregularly pitted 

 and honey-combed, but without such decided tnbes as are seen in the 

 upper beds. 



Charles Oldham describes another locality : — ' ' Detached from the 

 main body of the laterite north-west of Chellum, where just south of 

 Peddawarum (a village outside the northern edge of sheet 77) is a very 

 marked promontory or bluff of coarse ferruginous grits, conglomeratic 

 at base, passing upwards into a pebbly laterite and capped by dark red- 

 brown laterite, more clayey and more closely resembling the typical 

 laterite of the west coast and elsewhere. Of this more typical laterite 

 there is but a thin capping, and the mass of the headland is of a markedly 

 grit-like character/'' 



This bluff or headland is referred to by Foote in his Kistna memoi 

 ( 178 ) 



