176 



Proceedings of the Rot/(d Irish Academy. 



Fatmation and Ahrasmi. 



The flakes from the surface layers and upper beds of coarse gravel 

 are deeply patinated, presenting a white delft-like appearance. Tlie 

 edges are much chipped and abraded. In the lower beds the flints 

 appear to be somewhat less deeply patinated, and — a more important 

 difference — are, as a rule, sharper at the edges. This distinction had 

 been already noted by the Field Club committee, 



Mr. Knowles states that he has found flakes and cores in the 

 gravels which have had the hard glazed surface worn off along the 

 ridges. This, he considers, shows that the thick delft-like crust had 

 been formed on the flints and in part worn away before they were 

 included in the gravels, and that therefore the worked flints are older 

 than the formation in which they are found. ^ 



Our experience is, and it appears to have been that of the Field 

 Club committee, that the flints with abraded crust occur chiefly in the 

 upper layers, and for the most part in the disturbed surface portion. 

 Lower down the flints are sharper and often unpatinated or only partly 

 patinated. A large number of the flakes got in the aluminium works 

 were quite sharp and unpatinated. The sharpness and patination of 

 the flakes seem indeed to vary considerably, not only with the depth but 

 with the part of the beach examined. In our recent examination we 

 found many sharp flints near the surface of the gravels in a newly- 

 tilled field at the coastguard station on the Curran Point. 



Beach-rolling is not a marked feature of the flints. In the surface- 

 layers, and at all depths, some evidence of rolling is found occasionally 

 in a rubbing down of the edges and ridges of flints ; but it is not 

 characteristic, and the flakes and cores present a contrast to many of 

 those found amongst the spread gravels of the present beaches at Larne, 

 which are often so much rolled as to be hardly recognisable. This 

 implies that the gravels of at least the more inward parts of the raised 

 beach were not spread and exposed to wave-action for any long period 

 during the deposition of the gravels. The delft-like and white colour 

 of the patination of the flakes in the surface-layers — the patination of 

 the flints in the lower levels being of a cream-colour and less glazed- 

 looking — as well as the much-chipped state of the edges, is, no doubt, 

 a result in part of the constant re-exposure and disturbance of the 

 surface- layers by tillage. At some places, especially towards the 

 point of the Curran (P), we found, even in the surface-layer, numbers 



1 Proc. P. I. A., 2n(l Ser., vol. ii. (Polite Lit. and Antiq,), p. 437. 



