LOWER LIAS OF ROBIN HOOD'S BAY 



95 



Fig. 16 The foreshore at low tide in Wine Haven looking eastwards towards Peak and the bottom of the cliff below Ravenscar. L. Bairstow photograph, 

 1929 or 1930. This view looks along the prominent outcrop of Billet Scar (bed 474) in the middle of the photograph, and 'The Dock' crosses the beds 

 obliquely to the right. 



important part of his fellowship submission to King' College. He 

 kept carbon copies of the 85 typed pages of the sequence, and during 

 subsequent years up to 1 975 he made alterations, additions and notes 

 on the originals until the final size of the manuscript was about 230 

 pages. Many alterations were made to the bed numbering, especially 

 at the top, and to the bed thicknesses and details of the lithology, none 

 of which were fully finalized at the time of his fellowship submis- 

 sion. This manuscript is the basis for the much edited version of the 

 stratigraphical succession given below, where as much of the 

 lithological description as necessary has been retained to describe 

 and identify individual beds in the sequence. Bairstow measured bed 

 thicknesses on both the foreshore scars and in the cliffs in order to 

 arrive at figures he considered accurate, and his measurements in 

 feet and inches have been converted to metric units for this paper. 



The lithostratigraphical divisions given in the succession below 

 are not those of Bairstow. They are based on more recent work 

 described below in a separate section. Similarly, the zone and 

 subzone divisions given in the succession are based on revisions of 

 the identifications of all Bairstow's ammonites, also as described in 

 a separate section. Table 1 shows a detailed correlation between the 



zones and subzones, the bed numbers and the lithostratigraphical 

 divisions. 



Bed numbers 



Bairstow started his detailed description of the beds in 1928 by 

 giving the bed number 500 to the nodules that form the northern 

 boundary of The Landing at Bay Town, and worked up and down the 

 succession from that level. That bed number was selected because he 

 did not know what his lowest and highest numbers would be, and 

 also to 'prevent confusion with the numbers [1-132] given by Lang 

 to Lower Lias beds of similar age on the Dorset coast' . After several 

 changes to his various schemes, especially in the top part of the 

 succession, he finalized his numbering with bed 418 as the horizon 

 exposed at the lowest level reached by spring tides in the bay, and bed 

 601 as the highest he described in the Staithes Sandstone Formation 

 just beyond the northern end of the bay. In various places he 

 subdivided individual beds by giving numbers after a decimal point 

 (eg. beds 485. 1 , 485 .2, 485.3 ), and a few beds were subdivided to two 

 places of decimals (eg. beds 464.31, 464.32, 464.33). In bed 590, 



