386 THE DRIFTS OF FLAMBOROUGH HEAD. 



II. Physical Features of the Area. 



As usual, the character of the glaciation of this area has been 

 largely determined by the shape of the ground. 



Elamborough Head, which forms the abrupt termination of the 

 Yorkshire Wolds, may be described as a blunted triangle of high 

 land jutting out eastward for six miles into the North Sea. Its 

 base-line from the sea at Bridlington Quay to the sea at Speeton is 

 also about six miles in length (see fig. 1). It is edged on both 

 sides by precipitous cliffs of chalk, capped with variable drift, those 

 on the north ranging from 440 feet at Speeton to about 150 feet in 

 the neighbourhood of Flamborough ; but on the south they are not 

 nearly so high, excepting in one instance (Beacon Hill, 180 feet) 

 rarely exceeding 125 feet. The more easterly portion of the north 

 side of the promontory is for two miles broken up into numerous 

 little bays and inlets, frequently guarded by outstanding rock- 

 pinnacles, and tunnelled by caves ; but the cliffs of the remaining 

 four miles form a magnificent, unbroken, unscalable wall nearly 

 everywhere over 300 feet in height. 



Looking south from the headland across the open Bridlington 

 Bay we see the low land of Holderness, narrowing to a point at 

 Bridlington owing to the approach of the Wolds to the sea, but 

 widening rapidly southward into an uneven plain twenty miles 

 or more in width. This ground is made up altogether of drifts and 

 later deposits, and, as is well known, is rapidly diminishing as the 

 sea works its way back to its ancient bounds at the Wold-foot *. 



Looking north from the escarpment at Speeton, the eastern end 

 of the broad Vale of Pickering (here only about four miles in width), 

 which is scooped out of the soft Speeton and Kimeridge Clays, 

 separates the high land of the Chalk Wolds from the higher land of 

 the Oolitic moorlands. In the eastern portion of this hollow the 

 drifts have accumulated to a great depth. 



Inland, the steep escarpment, after leaving the coast at Speeton, 

 trends W.N.W. for nearly four miles, to Hunmanby, where it is 

 thrown northward for two miles by a fault ; it afterwards swerves 

 sharply west at Muston, and courses W. and W.S.W. for twelve or 

 fourteen miles, rising everywhere in bold slopes above the Vale of 

 Pickering. 



From the edge of the cliff at Speeton and Buckton (whence we 

 may look far westward along the smooth summits of the Eastern 

 Wolds, rising to 500 feet in elevation) the ground falls away inland, 

 leaving a broad depression which deepens eastward, and forms one 

 branch of a shallow valley running roughly parallel to the north 

 face of the promontory. This valley, which has its centre generally 

 less than a mile distant from the cliff line, is the chief feature of 

 the inland portion of the headland. The ground immediately to 

 the west of it rises to not quite the height of the surface near the 

 edge of the cliff's. It may be named the Bempton Valley, after a 



* See Geol. Survey Mem. ' Holderness,' p. 6. 



