

Manchester Memoirs, Vol. Ixii. (1918), No. 9. 7 



faces south and overlooks the canalised portion of the River Irwell ; 

 the altitude is about 75 feet O.D. 



Whilst on vacation last year in the Wirral district of Cheshire, 

 I discovered three interesting occurrences of facetted pebbles in 

 association with Glacial deposits. All are situated in the Hoylake 

 neighbourhood. One of the sites lies between Caldy and West 

 Kirby, on the Dee estuary. Here a few facetted Drift pebbles were 

 obtained from the wind-blown sand overlying the cliffs of Boulder- 

 clay. Another and more interesting site is at. Hilbre Point, not 

 many feet above sea-level. Wind-eroded pebbles, of Borrowdale 

 and other rocks, were here encountered on, and embedded in, the 

 surface of the Boulder-clay, overlying the Bunter Pebble-beds. 

 Immediately above the zone of the eroded pebbles is a well-defined 

 Neolithic floor underlying blown-sand. The most important and 

 interesting discovery, however, was made at Dove Point, Meols. 

 Pebbles of various North- Western Drift rocks, showing distinct 

 evidence of wind erosion, were met with in profusion in the upper 

 portion of the reddish Boulder-clay and in the lower part of an 

 overlying layer of bluish clay, some distance out from the shore, and 

 much below the level of an ordinary spring tide. The blue clay of 

 the section is probably altered Boulder-clay. The sand content is 

 chiefly in the form of well-rounded and fairly large grains of quartz. 

 It underlies the Lower Peat and Forest-bed of the Cheshire coast. 



The peculiar character of the pebbles occurring in the blue clay 

 below the Lower Peat and Forest -bed at this locality seems to have 

 been incidentally noticed by T. Mellard Reade, some seventeen 

 years ago, but he attributed their shape to being " glacially facetted." x 

 Stones, it is true, are occasionally polished and facetted by glaciers, 

 but these differ from those worn by sand-blast. The ground surface 

 is flatter and generally exhibits characteristic glacial striae ; the 

 harder and softer constituents, too, of the rock have not been differ- 

 entiated. The Dove Point examples, however, exhibit all the 

 characters of wind-eroded pebbles. 



The only other indication I can find of the probable occurrence 

 of wind -worn pebbles in the Wirral district is contained in a paper 

 by W. T. Walker on " The Boulder-Clay of North Wirral." 2 In 

 his description of the clay pit owned by the Moreton Brick Company, 

 this author states that amongst the objects of interest in this pit are : 

 " Tetrahedral pyramids and triangular prisms, and striated stones. 

 These seem to be fairly abundant, and although many of the striations 

 are undoubtedly caused by ice action, I would submit that some 

 show evidence of wind-etching, and would on this account be classed 

 as Dreikanters " (Walker, op. cit., p. 322). Doubtless Mr. Walker's 

 conjecture is the right one, but unfortunately he does not specify the 

 position of the pebbles, whether at the surface of the Boulder-clay 

 or otherwise. The clay pit lies about half-a-mile from the coast, 

 and the land surface is not more than 12 or 15 feet above sea-level. 

 It is situated about a mile and a half east of the Dove Point section. 



x Geol. Mag., March, 1900, p. 98. 



2 Proc. Liverpool Geol. Soc, XI., Pt. IV., 1913, pp. 317-324. 



