•f Farming of Lincolnshire. 



275 



details would not have been given, had not the supracretaceeus 

 deposits of this county been either unknown or confounded with 

 the drift and alluvium which form a part of them. The soil is 

 generally a strong heavy clay or a loamy clay. In the southern 

 portions it is very stiff and retentive ; between Hogsthorpe, Hut- 

 toft, and Alford, &c., where numerous round knolls or hills of 

 the clay rise up through the crust of marsh land, it is a brown 

 loam on a clay bottom, or else a superior free-working clay. 

 North of Louth the soil is close, adhesive, and wet ; there are sur- 

 face variations, but the general tract is naturally cold and poor. 

 From Grimsby to Barton is a strong clay and a reddish-brown 

 loam of productive quality ; and between this and the chalk is a 

 belt of more friable land, — deep, fertile, and good. 



In this county there are extensive deposits of the sand, gravel, 

 and other materials which, occurring upon the surface of the older 

 stratified formations, have been denominated " Diluvium,''^ or 

 Drifts The currents of the great Northern Drift, which 

 swept the Cumbrian boulders and other erratic detritus along the 

 vale of York and over the chalk hills to Holderness and the Hum- 

 ber, appear to have shaped the present surface of Lincolnshire 

 and the fens by their denudation of the strata, and by heaping the 

 transported matter in various directions to a great thickness. The 

 lowest member of the drift, viz., blue or brown clay, containing 

 nodules of chalk and large blocks of stone, which overspreads 

 wide spaces of the Oxford clay and other strata in the southern 

 fens of Cambridgeshire (probably carried thither by the floods 

 that burst the barrier of chalk hills and formed the present Wash 

 estuary), is not widely distributed over the same valley in Lin- 

 colnshire ; having been found only in a few localities upon the 

 borders of the Witham fens, and as a strip of high land stretch- 

 ing northward from Sibsey, dividing the east and west fens. It is 

 occasionally met with east of the Wolds ; and in sinking wells, 

 masses of chalk have been found lying upon the bed of plastic clay. 

 In the brickyards below Louth the boulder clay is laid open ; the 

 top soil is a brown clay, with layers of chalk nodules and flints, 

 at from 1 to 4 feet depth ; and under these are brown and blue 

 clays, very hard in some places, in others changing to a soft whitish 

 marly clay with similar chalk detritus beneath it. Boulders of the 

 primary formation occur, and also beds of yellowish sandy shale 

 and sandy earth. On the chalk hills are several local beds of 

 drift. Between Welton and North Ormsby (west of Louth) are 

 two hills composed of large irregularly-shaped reddish flints 

 among veins of red and black sand, from 1 to 20 or 30 feet 

 thick above the chalk ; and between Kelstern and Binbrook are 

 deep deposits of gravel, red sand, and large flints. At Has:- 

 worthingham is a bed of ferruginous flinty gravel, a coarse drift 



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