J. SHIP:yIAN : ANCIENT BEACH AT CASTLE DONINGTON. 37 



sub-angular bits of quartz here and there along the planes of bedding. 

 Above the chocolate-coloured sand-rock came the breccia, eighteen 

 inches thick, which preserved the same thickness with remarkable 

 uniformity throughout the length of fifty feet that it was exposed. 

 An examination of the materials composing the breccia showed that 

 it was made up of angular, or only slightly water-worn bits of highly 

 indurated or metamorphosed slaty rock, very compact, hard, pale- 

 greenish grit, concretionary ironstone, and pebbles of quartz, with an 

 occasional fragment of what seemed to be decomposing impure lime- 

 stone, like the Carboniferous Limestone of Breidon Hill, about four 

 miles to the south-west, the whole embedded in a purplish-red clayey 

 matrix. Only about thirty per cent, of the fragments of the breccia 

 had been derived from similar rocks to those on which the Keuper 

 rested, but as they were all angular, and still retained their sharp edges 

 as if they had not been long broken off the parent cliff, they could not 

 have been rolled about much in the water before they became 

 covered up, and therefore could hardly have travelled far. All this 

 showed that the cliff from which the breccia was derived must have 

 been close at hand. The breccia was probably formed by the 

 v;earing back of a third and higher terrace, which must have occupied 

 a position a little above the level of the present road to Cavendish 

 Bridge. But of this terrace, or of the chff that doubtless rose up 

 behind it, nothing now remains ; in its stead there is the broad 

 expanse of the Trent Valley. And where to the south stretched far 

 as the eye could reach, the open waters of the Keuper lake, there 

 are now the swelling hills of red marl that form so large a portion 

 of North Leicestershire. The breccia represented the ancient beach 

 of the Keuper lake, strewn, as many a modern beach may be seen 

 strewn at the present day where there happens to be a cliff, with 

 angular bits and pieces of rock, some resting on the surface of the 

 muddy beach, others in various stages of submergence in the deposits 

 now forming around our coasts. 



Three points in the ancient physical geography of the Castle 

 Donington area are brought prominently before us by t?ie section 

 which was here exposed. First of all we see that after the deposi- 

 tion of the Carboniferous strata, and before the dawn of the Keuper 

 period, these rocks had been forced upward into a great anticlinal 

 ridge, extending in a north-west and south-easterly direction. In 

 the second place, the Permian and the three sub-divisions of the 

 Bunter formation are absent. It is very probable that they were 

 never deposited over this area, and that it must, therefore, have 

 formed land for a long period during this interval, until it was ulti- 

 mately submerged by the waters of the Keuper lake. Then, thirdly, 



Feb. 1887. 



