14 
THE GEOLOGIST. 
before described, containing fir-cones and nuts, witb bones of 
the deer and other animals. 
This stratum may be seen as the underlying formation along 
the whole line of beach from Happisburgh to Mundesley. 
Mr. Lyell mentions this forest bed as having been seen also 
at Sidestrand, about a mile and a half north-west of Trimming- 
ham, where the cliff, composed of drift, is 120 feet high. It 
consists of beds of laminated blue-clay and sand, six or seven 
feet thick, in which are some stumps of trees three feet in dia- 
meter, broken off to within a few inches of the roots, which 
spread for a distance of several feet on all sides. At the point 
near the bottom of the cliff, a stratum of clay has been seen in 
which freshwater shell of the genus Unio abound — apparently 
unio ovalis. 
At Cromer, Mr. Simons has observed beneath the drift, seve- 
ral feet below high-water mark, a bed of lignite, in which are 
found the seeds of plants and the wing case of a beetle. This 
lignite contains coniferous woods and cones of the Pinus abies 
or spruce fir, a northern species not indigenous in Britain. 
Mr. Simons also saw at Cromer ten or more trees in the space 
of half an acre exposed below the clifi*s to the eastward of the 
town, the stumps being a few inches, or all less than a foot, in 
vertical height, some of them no less than a foot in gii'th, the 
roots spreading from them on all sides, throughout a space 
twenty feet in diameter. 
Mr. Rich. Taylor believes this bed, as visible at Happisburgh, 
to be an extension of the well-known stratum at Watton cliff 
and Harwich, " There is,^^ he says, " evidence sufficient to prove 
that it extends more south than Palling, even as low down as 
"Winterton, and Caistor, also at Lowestoff.^^ — Gi^een's Sketch of 
the Geologij of Bacton. 
