102 S. V. WOOD, JUN., AND F. W. HARMER ON THE 



inland of these cliffs which are shown in the sketch map as stretch- 

 ing westward on the north side of Blyth, consist of the Pebbly 

 sands for the most part resting on the Chillesford beds, though in 

 the neighbourhood of Halesworth and Henham they have taken the 

 place of these latter and lie up against a low cliff or foreshore of 

 the Chillesford Clay in the condition of thick masses of beached 

 shingle — a feature which we regard as due to the conversion of that 

 clay together with the Crag into land between the close of the Crag 

 and the commencement of the Glacial periods. Everywhere along 

 the outcrop of these pebbly sands, the Contorted Drift seems to have 

 been removed, the only remnants that we discovered between the 

 Waveney and the Aide being at Sotteiiey brick-kiln (yielding 

 traces of Mactra ovalis and Tellina balthica), and a doubtful one at 

 the north end of Easton Cliff, which is also exposed in a pit a short 

 way inland near Covehithe church. Along the south side of the Blyth, 

 from a point a little east of Halesworth to the sea, we could detect no 

 signs of the Lower Glacial pebbly sands, or of the Chillesford Clay, 

 and the Middle Glacial seems to go down to the water-level, indi- 

 cating, as it appears to us, another space of interglacial denudation ; 

 and from this neighbourhood southwards we lose trace of any thing 

 that can be identified with the Lower Glacial sands; indeed the 

 masses of shingle around Halesworth and Henham, into which 

 these sands change, coupled with their highly oblique bedding, seem 

 to show that the southern shore-line of the sea depositing such sands 

 passed somewhere near those places. Along the coast-section 

 southwards also we lose all trace of the Contorted Drift ; but inland 

 we found what seemed to be an immense and deep excavation in it 

 at Blaxhall, on the tableland between the rivers Aide and Deben. 

 Unfortunately this excavation, though dry to the bottom, was mostly 

 overgrown, and the section obscured ; but a mass of marl imbedded 

 in red brick-earth exactly resembling that of the Contorted Drift in 

 the Norfolk cliff, was exposed at one part, and a short way off was a 

 small pit in another mass of marl, while good sections of the Upper 

 resting on the Middle Glacial occurred within half a mile. Had 

 this exposure stood alone, we should have hesitated to call it a 

 protrasion of the Contorted Drift through this tableland ; but the 

 discovery of several such protrusions which, in our opinion, are free 

 from all question, many miles to the south, on the tableland dividing 

 the Deben from the Orwell, leaves no doubt in our minds that the 

 Contorted Drift overlapped the pebbly sands, and stretched southwards 

 in considerable thickness at least as far as the extremity of Suffolk. 

 This Blaxhall protrusion, like those north-west of Lowestoft, 

 through one of which the line of section XVI. (p. 97) is carried, and 

 those at Woodbridge and Kesgrave (sections XX. and XXI. pp. 104, 

 105), indicates, as it seems to us, that the tableland dividing the Aide 

 from the Deben is underlain by the Contorted Drift, and that the 

 valleys of both these rivers have been excavated out of it. Indeed, if 

 we are right in this, a line of section drawn through the Blaxhall 

 protrusion from the valley of the Deben to that of the Aide would in 

 all respects, save that the tableland would be capped throughout 



