74 
DESCRIPTION OF THE COAST. 
lower beds are usually most solid, and project from the cliffs in broad floors, 
covered with pectines, cardia, dentalia, aviculae, gryphaeae, &c. Thickness 
variable, from forty to one hundred and twenty feet. 
17, Lower lias shale, more solid, less fissile, and generally of coarser and more sandy 
texture than 15, with a different suite of organic remains, amongst which 
plicatulae, gryphaeae, and pinnae are, perhaps, most characteristic. Thickness 
exposed in Huntcliff less than two hundred feet, at the Peak three hundred 
feet, but the bottom is nowhere seen. 
Huntcliff has the advantage of shewing a greater thickness of the 
lower shale than Rockcliff, but its series is very incomplete above ; the 
upper shale having retired inland beneath the beacon. There is hardly 
any diluvial matter observable on the high summits of Rockcliff, but it 
occupies a large portion of the lower cliffs near Skinningrave ; is in con- 
siderable quantity on Huntcliff; and gradually thickens toward Saltburn, 
till at length the lias formation is abruptly truncated, and the whole cliff 
is diluvial. Henceforward to the Tees no regular stratum appears in 
any cliff beneath the diluvium, but at low-water, opposite Redcar, the 
lower shale with characteristic fossils stands up in bare hard rocks. 
Having thus brought to a close the descriptions of the strata of the 
Yorkshire coast, it remains to add a few remarks on the composition of 
the diluvial accumulation which is visible on so many of the cliffs be- 
tween Bridlington and the mouth of the Tees. These remarks, if in- 
troduced in detached portions amongst the descriptions of the solid 
strata, would have been much less intelligible than when brought into 
one point of view. 
As in Holderness and at Flamborough, so in the more northern cliff’s, 
the most abundant of the diluvial accumulations is a mass of clay un- 
equally filled with a variety of pebbles, and occasionally divided by 
partial deposits of sand and gravel. These are the materials heaped in 
