io6 
PROCEEDINGS COTTESWOLD CLUB 
1919 
the weathered Lower Lias, and are occasionally associated 
with blocks of chalk and a few quartzite pebbles and grey 
flints. 
Gavey ( 56 , p. 35) states that some of the flints at Aston 
Magna weighed as much as 2 cwt., and that the original white 
coating was uninjured. He also found there blocks of hard 
chalk, some “ greensand,” siliceous sand, and pebbles in the 
Lias clay, which is much disturbed by landslips. (See also 
115 , p. 97.) The section is now overgrown, and the specimens 
described by Gavey have not been preserved. At Compton 
Scorpion and Goose Hill there are large and small black flints 
in a condition quite suitable for the manufacture of implements ; 
and it was, doubtless, from the above sources that the black 
flints used by the Neolithic artificers on the Cotteswolds were 
obtained ( 67 , p. 74). 
The unabraded condition of these flints negatives the 
supposition that they could have been exposed to the attrition 
inseparable from transport by land or floating ice, or that they 
could have formed part of a river-gravel. They cannot, 
therefore, be properly included in the Drift series or regarded 
as a deposit of Glacial age. 
The explanation offered by Conybeare (quoted by Buckland 
22 , pp. 196-97), and by Brodie ( 19 , p. 209), that the abundance 
of Flints, Chalk and Greensand in parts of the district under 
review suggested a former extension of Cretaceous strata, is 
still in my opinion the most satisfactory, and may be applied 
to the Black Flints. Mr. S. S. Buckman is of opinion that 
the Moreton anticline was a line of considerable movement in 
Carboniferous time, of repeated movement in Jurassic time, 
and was certainly a line of movement in post-Cretaceous time. 
It is therefore possible that there was a thinning out of Jurassic 
and Cretaceous strata resulting in the deposition of the 
Micraster-cor-anguinum zone, from which the Black Flints were 
derived, within a short vertical distance of the Lower Lias upon 
which they now lie. On this subject Mr. H. C. Versey informs 
me that the effect of the Islip anticline and the synclinal between 
Islip and the Vale of Moreton would make the position of the 
Micraster zone about (?) 1,000 feet above the present position 
