447 
Ihe “ Cromer Clay'’ (says Prof. James Geikie) “points to the near 
vicinity of a great ice-sheet, which deployed upon the bed of the 
sea, and e.xtruded there its morainic mud and stones.”* And after 
this earliest introduction of ice, it would seem that the conditions 
so .altered by further submergence, that there were laid down 
sedimentary deposits of brickearth and marl, of sand and gravel, 
still in groat measure the product of the land-ice and icebergs. 
But these deposits were subsequently acted upon by a force 
sufficient to produce the violent contortions before mentioned. 
Whether this force w.as an ice-sheet pushing against and over the 
land (after the uphe.aval of the beds and during the formation of 
tlio Ch.alky Boulder Clay), stripping off nnisses of Chalk and 
thrusting them amidst the strat.a, as Mr. Clement Ileid maintains j 
or whether the huge boulders were derived origin.ally from bordering 
cliffs, severed by the expansive force of ice in fissures, and shifted 
by coast ice, .os conjectured by Mr. T. Mellard Ptcado, f is a 
debatable question. Such transported m.asses are not confined to 
Norfolk. There is a well-known boulder of chalk at Eoslyn Pit, 
near Ely, and transported masses of Inferior Oolite and Marlstono 
have been observed in Lincolnshire, and in connection with 
Chalky Boulder Clay. That the .agent which formed this Cl.ay, 
brought also the great boulders, and contorted the beds over "a 
considerable portion of Norfolk, seenrs to me most prob.able. 
We are, however, entering into the region of theory, and my object 
in going so far, w.as to suggest an origin for some of the great heaps 
of boulder gravel. 
Sc.attered over the high grounds of Holt and Cromer, on the hills 
in AVest Norfolk, and in outliers at Strumpshaw and Poringl.and, 
are deposits of coarse flint-gravel, containing Large blocks of flint, 
and sometimes paramoudras j and when I referred previously to the 
■\vo.ar .and tear of the Chalk in Miocene times, as probably resulting 
in accumulations of flints, I thought then of these gravels, and have 
wondered whether they might not have been thus derived and 
transported by glaci.al action, partly in the same way as some of the 
* ‘ Great Ice Age ’ [2] p. 391. See also S. V. Wood, Quart. Joum, Gcol. 
Soc. vol. xxxvi. pp. 463—472, &c. 
t Quart. Journ. Geol. Soc. vol. xxxviii. p. 222. 
