APPENDIX C : STRATIFICATION OF HACKNESS HILLS 
231 
and that on the best farms is covered with a soil so superior to the one 
preceding that a pasture south of Broxa the difference in the herbage 
over the two rocks is easily distinguished. It forms only a small 
insular portion of soil under and just around the village of Broxa. It 
occurs north and east of Silpho, mostly north and west of Tholso Farm, 
where it produces the fine piece of land called the great pasture. South- 
eastward it is narrowed between the ravines and moors but widens 
again north of Suffield. It is considerably obscured about the village 
by a diluvial covering, but in its greatest and most regular breadth 
occupying many long narrow fields it was anciently distinguished by 
the name of " Suffield Ings " and about the northernmost of the two 
farms in Suffield heights it forms two large and good old pastures 
and the soil over this bed, which is only a parting between the wallstone 
and limestone of the stratum called coralline oolite, wherever it is in 
tillage grows the best wheat. It is remarkable that most of the pools 
on these hills for supplying stock with water are in the range of this 
stratum though we cannot suspect the makers of them of knowing any- 
thing about Geology. 
The limestone occurs in several places which we shall next 
describe it forms lower ground than the preceding stratum and is about 
twenty feet or more in thickness but which, like the thinner divisions 
of the great rock, makes no perceptible difference in the gradually 
sloping surface of the hills except in its having a thinner soil thickly 
strewed with fragments of Limestone. The Limestone forms properly 
saintfoin land, but from its contiguity to the woods and the thinness 
of the soil in some of its banks, much of it has long lain in sheep walks ; 
burnet abounds in its herbage which however, forms a great con- 
trast with that of the soil before described. The Limestone occurs in 
several places, but nowhere of the full thickness of the rock except on 
the hill south of Silpho, as on no other parts of the limestone can the 
Melanse Striatus, Heddingtonensis, and the coral on the top of the rock 
be found. 
This coial hes just beneath the soil about a quarter of a mile in 
length, but is soon covered with some of the Upper Calcareous Grit, 
wh. on the higher part of three or four fields producing a fine loamy 
soil, like that on the same rock on the border of the low ground in the 
A^'ale of Pickering, and which is there called Red Land " and which 
by good judges is consideied to be the best arable land in the Vale. This 
is the highest stratum on Hackness hills, and from the pile of rocks 
