﻿1861.] 



DKEW HASTINGS SAND. 



277 



this very stratum, that was dug to supply the furnaces that once 

 abounded in this part of the country. The shallow round pits by 

 which it was extracted can yet be seen in many of the woods ; they 

 must not be confounded with the large openings, now partly filled 

 up and much overgrown, or else forming ponds, that were made, 

 also many years back, to get shale, or " marl " as they call it 

 here, with which it was the custom to dress the land. It may be 

 that in digging this out they put aside and carried to the furnace 

 whatever ironstone was met with : all tradition, however, points to 

 the small shallow holes as the source of the ore, which went (and 

 still goes) by the name of "iron-mine" or "mine-stone," while the pits 

 are called " mine-pits," and the large places are everywhere recog- 

 nized as "marl-pits." I should mention that on the south of Wad-, 

 hurst Tunnel, in the railway-cutting, I saw a thickness of 15 feet of 

 sandstone and loam in this clay, and once or twice besides I have 

 seen traces of a similar bed. It is likely enough that the same sort 

 of thing occurs in other places, where it escapes notice (for in a clay 

 country deep sections are always scarce) ; yet I have seen enough 

 to be convinced that this bed is very nearly all of clay. 



4. Ashdown Sand. — The " Ashdown Sand" comes next ; it has no 

 character to distinguish it from the Tunbridge Wells Sand ; the 

 two can only be separated by regarding their positions with respect 

 to the Wadhurst Clay, or, if this fails on account of faults being 

 present, by slight and quite local differences. It is a similar collec- 

 tion of layers of sandstone and loam with an occasional bed of rock- 

 sand ; and it has this further resemblance, that the top is in many 

 places a good thick bed of rock-sand : this is well seen in four or 

 five of the valleys lying on the north of the road from Wadhurst to 

 Mark Cross, which reach through the clay to the Ashdown Sand. I 

 do not think I have found this bed making natural rocks like the one 

 at the top of the other sands. 



Clay-ironstone occurs occasionally in the upper sandy subdivision; 

 but yet more is found in the Ashdown Sand. A good deal may be 

 seen in the heaps brought up from the Wadhurst Tunnel and thrown 

 out above it ; and in the railway-cutting, a mile and a half further 

 down the line, it has lately been worked to see if it would answer to 

 transport it to the North. On Ashdown Forest, too, it occurs fre- 

 quently, generally with a coating of brown iron- ore ; there are two 

 or three pits where it is now being dug for roadstone ; and I have 

 heard that about here like stone used to be extracted from the sand 

 for smelting. 



A bed of clay and shale occurs in these sands ; it is seen at several 

 points south of Frant and along the north of Ashdown Forest ; at 

 the latter part it appears to be 30 feet or more in thickness. 



These sands have a great spread about Ashdown Forest ; it is in- 

 deed the central district of the Hastings Sand, where these low beds 

 rise and make the highest ground of any in the whole formation. 



The deep valleys that cut across Ashdown Forest reach clown to 

 such a depth as to expose, I should think, 250 feet in thickness of 



