84 Submerged Forests. 



about high water mark at Cobo, but the richest deposits are 

 beneath the sands at Vazon Bay, where it has been dug into to 

 a depth of twenty feet. The erect position of the trunks of the 

 trees, and various other indications seem to warrant the con- 

 clusion that the plants forming this substance (called " gorban " 

 in Guernsey) must have grown on the spot where they are now 

 found, and this must therefore have been at a higher level than 

 at present. Trunks of full-sized trees occur in the deposit, 

 acorns and hazel nuts are preserved in it, also teeth of hogs and 

 horses, but the presence of pottery and some implements seem 

 to prove that the change must have taken place in compara" 

 tively modern times. 



Indications of a similar movement exist on the coasts of 

 Jersey : indeed local historians generally assert that a sub- 

 sidence has taken place within historic times over all the inner 

 part of the Bay of St. Malo.* 



But the occurrence of phenomena in this island which 

 prove an opposite movement is not so generally known, and on 

 Whit-Tuesday, 1883, the members of this society made an ex- 

 cursion to two localities which give evidence of an elevating 

 movement. 



^Submerged forests are common along the shores of Great Britain 

 and Western Europe. In Geikies' Prehistoric Europe, localities are 

 named showing them on all the English coasts. He states that they 

 occur on the coasts of Scotland and Ireland, also of Holland and France, 

 naming amoug other localities : — ' Along the Western coast of Cotentin, 

 at Dol, St. Malo,' etc. With respect to our own district, Geikie says : — 

 4 'No thorough examination appears to have been made of any of the 

 submarine peat and trees of this district, and we cannot therefore be 

 certain whether or not they are of the same age as that of the Somme 

 and Flemish coast, not so far as I know have they disclosed a succession 

 of beds like that which is furnished by the postglacial deposits of Corn- 

 wall. Some antiquarians indeed maintain that the submarine trees that 

 occur along the coast between St. Malo and Cape La Hougue are the 

 relics of a broad belt of forest land which was overwhelmed by the sea 

 in the year 709, although the submergence was not completed till 860. 

 There may possibly enough be some truth in these statements, but it is 

 questionable if the submergence was so great as the antiquarians sup- 

 pose At all events we shall probably not err in assigning 



the growth of the now submerged trees and peat of the Channel Islands 

 and the adjacent French shores mainly to pre-historic times." 



