FOREST MARBLE: CIRENCESTER. 367 
FT. IN. 
r* T. t- f Bubbly beds of marly and shelly lime- 
Cornbrash -4 ston g . . . - - 3 
"Brown and greenish-grey clay, with 
thin layers of sandy limestone and 
"race'" - - - - 6 
Forest Marble - 
Hard brown oolitic and shelly lime- 
stone - -.30 
Shaly bed (a few inches) . 
False-bedded oolitic limestones. 
The above section, noted in 1886, differ considerably from one 
recorded in 1857 at the same locality by Prof. Buckman.* The 
evidence, however, afforded by the quarries and railway-cuttings, 
shows how rapidly the beds change in character. 
In the railway-cutting west of the new Cirencester-town station, 
there was a considerable thickness of clay with thin bands of 
gritty limestone, beneath the Cornbrash. (See Fig. 131, p. 444.) 
Towards the east in the Norcott cutting this clay rests on a mass 
of fissile shelly and oolitic limestones, seen to a depth of about 
8 feet. These stone-beds are false-bedded, and they contain 
lignite, Lima cardiiformis, Ostrea Soicerbyi, Pectcn annulatus, 
P. lens, Fish-remains, &c. They rest on clays with beds of shelly 
oolite developed at inconstant horizons. Quarries south of 
Ampney Field Barn, west of Norcott, and south of Siddington 
St. Mary, showed 10 feet of these false-bedded oolitic and shelly 
limestones, with seams of clay and sandy layers. The stone itself 
contains marly and ochreous galls. Nodules perforated by boring 
Molluscs, and encrusted by Serpula? and Polyzoa, have been 
noticed in the Forest Marble of this neighbourhood.! 
The railway-cuttings to the north-west of Norcott, showed 
excellent sections of the Forest Marble, in alternations of obliquely 
bedded oolitic shelly limestone with irregular bands of clay and 
stone. In one place the shelly and oolitic limestones showed a, 
series of curved beds, no doubt the result of irregular deposition, 
although presenting the appearance of denuded synclinal and 
anticlinal structures.! The evidence shows the inconstant nature 
of the stone-beds in the Forest Marble, for the clays swell out at 
the expense of the limestones in a very abrupt manner. The 
beds here shown belong to the middle and lower part of the 
Forest Marble. (See Figs. 101-103). 
The stone-beds were exposed in a quarry near the 15th 
milestone, on the high-road east of Daglingworth, and here some 
of the limestones are more or less gritty in character. 
Beds of flaggy calcareous sandstone (usually much ripple- 
marked), and loamy sands, with concretionary masses of stone, 
are quarried here and there, near Driifield Cross, Furzen Leaze. 
&c. They appear to occur generally above the main mass of 
* Quart. Journ. Geol. Soc., vol. xiv. p. 119. 
t Morris, Geol. Mag., 1875, p. 267. Morris found 39 per cent, of silica in a 
specimen of Forest Marble from near Cirencester, p. 268. 
J Similar features, on a larger scale, have been noticed in the Frodsham Beds 
(Lower Keuper Sandstone) by Mr. A. Strahan, Geol. Mag. 1881, p. 396. 
See also Hull, Geol. Cheltenham, p. 69. 
