103 
THE EROSION OF THE YORKSHIRE COAST. 
Rev. E. MAULE COLE, M.A., F.G.S., 
Vicar of Wetwang, East Yorkshire, Hon. Sec. to the Yorkshire Natural’sts’ Union Coast 
Erosion Committee, 
THE Committee, of which Mr. J. W. Woodall, M.A., F.G.S., of 
Scarborough, is Chairman, and the writer is Honorary Secretary, also 
includes Mr. J. C. I’Anson, F.G.S., F.S.A., of Saltburn-by-the-Sea, 
Rev. H. E. Maddock, M.A., F.G.S., of Patrington Rectory, and 
Mr. F. Fielder Walton, F.G.S., of Hull; and, as extra members, 
Messrs. C. E. DeRance, F.G.S., and Wm. Topley, F.G.S., the 
Secretaries of the British Association Committee appointed to deal 
with the same subject. Our Yorkshire Committee was first appointed 
in November 1888, and has since been re-appointed annually. 
The following paper includes the reports for 1889 and 1890. 
The great variety of material, of which the rocks which form the 
Yorkshire coast are composed, necessarily gives rise to a very jagged 
outline. Here, the sea has free access to the base of a perpendicular 
cliff, and the waves that rage horribly gather increased force from 
rushing over a smooth, slippery scar of lias ; there, masses of fallen 
sandstone or chalk are heaped up in wild confusion at high-water 
mark, and serve as a breakwater to defy the fury of the winter 
storms. Erosion, however, is always going on, although unequally 
and somewhat fitfully. One cannot look at those lias and limestone 
Scars and chalk pavement, stretching out to sea far beyond the low- 
water mark, without realising that they are the bases of cliffs long 
since worn away, and that the present coast-line is very different from 
what it was in the ages that are passed. If this be true of compara- 
tively hard rocks, much more is it true of that softer material which 
fills so many pre-glacial valleys of the Yorkshire coast—namely, 
boulder clay. This clay is subject to a two-fold denudation—sub- 
aerial and marine. Rain moistens it, and causes the sticky substance 
to be ever on the move downwards; springs, issuing from streaks of 
sand, undermine it and produce great landslips; frost breaks off huge 
Masses, and sends them thundering to the beach below; and then 
the sea licks, and washes, and grinds, and churns, till thousands of 
tons are converted into the finest possible mud, and carried away by 
the tide to form fresh land in the ages to come, and nothing is left 
but a few boulders, which for a time help to swell the ever-shifting 
. a shingle as it travels southwards. 
