'77 



THE FENLAND SOILS. 



Rev. EDWARD ADRIAN WOODRUFFE PEACOCK, L.Th., F.L.S., F.G.S., 

 Vicar of Cadney, Organising- and Botanical Secretary, Lincolnshire Naturalists' Union. 



No one can understand the meaning- of the phrase ' Fenland 

 Soils ' who is not a native of the level and something- of 

 a g-eolog-ist. The maps, pictorial diagrams, and illustrations 

 I show you [The Spalding- Gentlemen's Society] this evening- 

 are for the purpose of bringing home this truth. It is 

 a practical as well as a scientific fact, as I hope I shall be 

 able to demonstrate. It was pointed out years ago that the 

 past and present shade into one another in the Fenland area — 

 geological time gradually changing into existing circumstances, 

 as the fauna and flora of the deposits and that of the time being 

 prove. 



During the Tertiary Epoch, especially in Newer Pliocene 

 time — which has not left a fragment of a bed in Lincolnshire — 

 the county stood at a much higher level than at present. One 

 chief river flowing through the now much-denuded Lincoln Gap, 

 joined by a number of smaller tributary streams flowing 

 from the west and south-west, cut out the huge basin of the 

 Fenland in the Secondary strata. The emboucher gap of this 

 river system is 20 miles across from the chalk at Skendleby, 

 in Lincolnshire, to the same rock at Hunstanton, in Norfolk. 

 This, however, gives but a poor idea of the Fenland proper, 

 which lies within the entrance chalk barrier. From Greetwell, 

 in Lincolnshire, to Quy-cum-Stow, in Cambridgeshire, the 

 distance in a bee line is 74 miles across peat and silt only. 

 In the other direction, from the west of Braceborough, in 

 Lincolnshire, to Wormegay, in Norfolk, it is 36 miles. The depth 

 cut down by this ancient river system is from 1,000 to 2,000 

 feet. As the Upper Chalk is wholly missing in this county, 

 having suffered denudation by marine or subaerial agencies as 

 it rose gradually from its deep-sea bed, and later from the ice- 

 plough of the Pleistocene Epoch — and the levels are not the 

 same as formerly — it is quite impossible to be more precise. 

 The whole of the Chalk and Neocomian strata were cut through 

 and removed ocean wards, and the Kimeridge Clay and even 

 a part of the Oxford Clay were cut out. Nothing could resist 

 the attrition and scooping power of the water from the thou 

 high lands of the west. As far as I know no contemporary 

 gravels, sands, or silts of the Tertiary River period have boon 

 observed, neither are they likely to be discovered. It is 



1902 June 1. M 



