The Lodge Farm, Castle Acre, Norfolk. 
4G3 
is many times larger, and similarly borders the road from 
Rougham to Castle Acre. In form it is reniform ; but the 
portion on the farm has one straight side formed by the road. 
The homestead is placed almost in the centre of the southern 
lobe of this kidney-shaped patch. 
Surrounding and underlying each of these two clay patches is 
a belt of chalk, which is broadest in a south-easterly direction. 
The smaller and more westerly is again nearly semicircular ; but 
the larger is bluntly lobed. There is also another south-easterly 
spur from the former of these, which is part of the abruptly- 
scarped mass on which most of the village is built, and the ruins 
of the castle and the priory stand. The valley between the two 
hill-spurs, and most of the remaining land on the farm consists of 
sand and gravel, some of it very light indeed, especially that in 
the valley. Bordering the chalk at Castle Acre, on both sides 
of the Nar, and for a quarter of a mile on the other side of the 
road leading to Newton, the subsoil consists of a stiff clay well 
known to geologists as the blue clay, or brick-earth, of the Nar. 
The features thus briefly described, and delineated on the map, 
appear now extremely simple. The hills are capped by clay, 
the valley-sides exhibit the outcropping chalk from beneath, and 
in the valley-soles the chalk is covered with gravel and sand ; 
while the river-flat, in some places, consists of a freshwater 
clayey deposit, probably formed by the river itself. But the dis- 
tribution of these deposits in relation to the river Nar is not a 
little puzzling, until the idea is forced upon one by repeated 
failures to understand the distribution of the formations. This 
district has never been mapped geologically, and the exact ages 
of the drift-deposits are unknown ; but that is a matter of very 
little consequence from an agricultural point of view. The 
remarkable feature is that the gravelly deposit does not follow 
the line of the valley of the Nar, but is quite independent of it ; 
and furthei', that Avhere the gravel does meet the Nar, the blue 
clay already mentioned seems to be absent. The gravel-holding 
valley is dry, that is to say, no stream runs in it ; and it has a 
direction roughly at right angles to the valley of the Nar. It is, 
in short, what is usually termed a dry lateral valley. On the 
other side of the river are two similar valleys, at least one of 
which is in gravel, and both of which meet in a spot nearly 
opposite to, but a little to the west of, the expanded mouth of 
the valley with which we are more particularly concerned. Now 
the form of this valley is not regular, and near the mouth are two 
hills ; one of these projects from the large chalk-escarpment 
towards and reaching the Nar in the form of a boot, the sole 
bordering the river, and the toe pointing westward. The other 
forms a kind of fringe connecting the two other projections of 
