502 S. V. WOOD, JUN., OK THE NEWEE 



Sheet 66 ; while in the same thin form in which it wraps the Hoxne 

 briekearth it stretches westwards to Brandon and Mildenhall, where, 

 according to a section prepared by Mr. Skertchley which was sent 

 to me, it wraps the palaeolithic briekearth and the Chalky Clay with 

 which that briekearth is overlain ; and in the north-east of Sheet 51 

 and south-east of 65, and some way over the division-line into the 

 corresponding parts of 50 and 66, it in this thin form covers the 

 country, Chalky Clay and Chalk alike. 



This, in my view, is the finer part of the spoil resulting from 

 the melting of the surface of the eastern edge of the great mass of 

 ice lying within the broken line after the shrinkage into the valleys 

 to the east of it had taken place, and the Hoxne lagoon had dis- 

 appeared. The volumes of water thus pouring over Norfolk being 

 unable to escape readily by reason of the ice still occupying the 

 valleys, the gravel which it produced by washing out the moraine, 

 and the large flints which by its torrential force it rolled into the 

 cannon-shot form described, were thus left on the plateaux and brows 

 of the valleys, the large stones nearest the water source, and the 

 smaller stones and sand carried furthest ; but as the ice gradually 

 wasted out of the valleys this spoil became deposited in their bottoms 

 and on their slopes, forming in this way the beds e', shown in the 

 Wensum and Yare valley in figs. YIII. and IX. Hence the fact, 

 otherwise so difficult of explanation, that these gravels form a series 

 from the higher to the lower levels, and cannot be separated, albeit 

 that the valleys thus containing them had been wholly excavated 

 before their accumulation. 



In its escape through the vaUeys, as the ice in wasting permitted 

 it, this water denuded the Hoxne briekearth, forming or enlarging 

 in so doing the lateral valley of the Goldbrook ; and as it sank away 

 it left the thin wrapper formed of gravelly sand which it carried over 

 the denuded surface of the briekearth. During all this it must be 

 remembered that the principal escape of the water was westward, in 

 accordance with the different inclination of the land at the time. 



The sheets of gravel that eventually accumulated in the valleys 

 from this agency, and form, as I have said (if sections be selected 

 from different parts of the area at different levels), an unbroken series 

 with the beds on the plateaux, are so distributed that their relative 

 presence and absence in closely contiguous areas in the same valley are 

 explicable in my view on no other hypothesis satisfactorily, because, 

 since we find that the Norfolk valleys had been excavated to more 

 than their present depth before the termination of the Chalky Clay, 

 it is obvious that gravel in them which rises, as some of this in the 

 valley does, to 50 feet above the river at Norwich, cannot be due to 

 the deposit of the rivers in a former more voluminous condition. 

 That rivers during so much of the Glacial period as succeeded the ice- 

 melting which I have traced, did occupy these valleys in greater 

 volume than at present I fully concede ; but in the east of Norfolk 

 and north-east of Suffolk their gravels must be below the surface of 

 the alluvium which now fills up these valleys, the sea-level in that 

 part of England having been at, and for some time after the close 



