NORWOOD — GEOLOGY OF HOTHAM. 



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a cast of Unicardium cardioides, to a hard rock-bed of the true Marlstone, 

 two or three feet in thickness, which again is capped at the top of the 

 ascent by a very rasty, rubbishy, and ferruginous rock. It is in the 

 last division only that I have succeeded in obtaining fossils at this place 

 in any quantity worth mentioning; and they are always in a very 

 corroded and imperfect condition. The most plentiful forms are Belem- 

 nites, and next to them, masses of RliyncJionella tetraedra ; but with 

 perseverance and good fortune Terehratula resupinata and other charac- 

 teristic shells of the Middle Lias may be collected here. This zone may 

 be traced both towards the north and south, though it does not maintain 

 that upland character which it assumes in Hotham Park, for more 

 perhaps than two miles of its course. It is seen in one direction, near 

 Hotham, as we leave that village by the road to Eeverley ; in the other 

 it crosses the turnpike at Everthorpe, and passes close by the castle and 

 church of South Cave. There is a moory valley with a surface of sand 

 and peat lying along on the north side of Hotham towards Wewbald, 

 between the escarpment of the Lower Lias on the one hand and the 

 rise of the chalk-wold on the other ; a favourite haunt, in spring and 

 summer, of lapwings and sand-martens. Two pits, which were opened 

 in this valley for marling, about a mile from Hotham church, have 

 exposed a substratum of remarkable drift which is very well deserving 

 of examination. It consists of a medley, in great masses more or less 

 rounded, of all the surrounding formations, from the Posidonomya- 

 bed " to the White Chalk, and contains some organic remains distinctive 

 of rocks which are not known at present to exist in situ anywhere 

 in the neighbourhood of Hotham. For example, it has supplied an 

 Ammonites cordatus, with a matrix of Oxford clay, which leads me to 

 suspect that that rock might be found stratified no great way off, 

 especially as the Kelloway rock occurs in its place hardly more than a 

 mile to the eastward. The fact, too, that the formations composing 

 this drift lie mostly to the westward of their proper lines would indicate 

 that the great transporting waters which accumulated these ponderous 

 and disordered masses had their origin in some eastward direction. 

 Mixed indiscriminately in the general ruin lie large and small blocks 

 of Middle Lias Marlstone^ dissimilar, however, in colour and texture 

 to the marlstone which I have mentioned as cropping out near ]^orth 

 Cave, and which may also be traced through Everthorpe and South 



Cave in its progress towards the Humber. The colour of there rocks 



2 M 



