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at Burtle and Westbury, the trunks of trees are found of the same dark 
colour, and some of them without their roots, and without their smaller 
limbs, shewing that they had probably rotted off between wind and water, 
and been drifted by water to the places where they are now found, their 
heads probably having been destroyed before the butt of the tree rotted off. 
As you go down the River Parrett at low water you see a line in the mud, which 
appears to project from the slimy bank, and if you ask the sailors what it is, 
they will tell you it is the half -tide lynch." Again, in the Brue, when the 
water is low, you can trace for miles, just at the water line, a band of black 
peat. These are the croppings out of a former surface of land buried beneath 
the alluvial. I have for several years interested myself in collecting in- 
formation as to the changes that have taken place in this alluvial district, and 
I have satisfied myself that there are at least three surfaces, that from some 
cause or causes have been buried by the alluvial deposit of the Bristol 
Channel. When the basin for the Taunton Canal was excavated a little 
above Bridgwater, a careful section was taken by the late Mr. Austin and 
Mr. Baker. At the depth of sixteen feet from the existing surface, which is 
below the level of high water mark in the River Parrett, was found a stratum of 
peat varying from one to two feet in thickness, which must have once grown 
on the surface, and in this were found fresh water shells of the same kinds as 
those now found in the present peat moors of Somerset. At twenty-eight feet 
below the existing surface there was found a stratum of pebbles. In this 
Mr. Austin found bones of the Ox, Horse, Deer, Dog or Fox, and Porpoise, in 
high preservation but very black, also Stag's horns, and with them a femoral 
bone, an ilium, a radius, and a humerus, all human, and a piece of coarse 
pottery; shells also, like those inhabiting our present shores were found 
there. In the stratum under this were found the roots and fibres of plants 
penetrating the red marl about twenty-nine feet below the water. Another 
section was made near the same spot when the Bristol and Exeter Railway 
Bridge over the Parrett was being built. This section varied but little from the 
other, except that the red marl was a little nearer the surface than at the 
canal basin. In the brick yards at Bridgwater the peat stratum sixtaen feet 
below the surface is nearly always found, and about seven or eight feet below 
the surface is frequently found another thin bed of peat, or other indications 
of another surface. In one of the brick yards below Bridgwater (Messrs. 
Colthurst and Symons's) an unfinished ship on the stocks was found, deep in 
the alluvial deposit. I did not see her, but I am informed that she was 
nearly sixty feet long ; and back in the peat moors adjoining the Somerset 
and Dorset Railway, between Highbridge and Glastonbury, there is similar 
evidence of buried surfaces. On my own estate at Westbury, I have dis- 
covered a timber road, about four feet in width, made of split poles, and leading 
across the peat land from the sand bank of Burtle to the sand bank of 
