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GLACIAL MARKINGS IN THE RED MARL. 
GLACIAL MARKINGS IN THE RED MARL.- 
By a. H. Atkins, B.Sc. 
For some time past the attention of local geologists has been 
directed to the marks of Glacial action in the Midland Counties. 
Their efforts tend to prove that the traces of the Glacial epoch extend 
as far south as Birmingham at least, and that either a sheet of ice 
covered this neighbourhood, or else a number of ice-covered islands 
lay in the midst of an extensive Glacial sea. As is well known, the 
most common traces of ice action consist of roches moutounees, scratches 
on the rocks, and boulder clay containing striated and polished pebbles 
and boulders. The former evidences are scarcely possible near Bir¬ 
mingham, where all the rocks are too soft to receive or retain such 
markings. At the Rowley Hills, however. Dr. Crosskey has discovered 
large blocks of basalt striated in a manner which points to the action 
of ice. 
Of the latter traces—viz., Boulder Clay, etc.—the best section in 
this locality is to be seen at California, near Harborne, where there is a 
thick bed of tenacious clay, containing fragments of all sizes most 
perfectly scratched and polished, which also show in which direc¬ 
tion they have travelled, for among them may be found fragments of 
basalt, limestone coal-shale, limestone, slate, and in fact almost all 
the rocks which occur in situ between here and North Wales. Patches 
of a similar clay may be met with in other localities, as, for instance, 
Wash wood Heath and Tysull. In almost every case it is accompanied 
and interbedded with masses of Drift, and there seems no doubt that 
these latter beds were deposited at about the same period. 
This paper, however, as the title intimates, bears more especially 
on the traces found in the Red Marl, the uppermost division of the 
Trias formation. 
This bed extends southward from Birmingham to Warwick and 
Stratford, and consists of marl interstratified with characteristic layers 
of brown sandstone and white or grey shale. These bands contain in 
abundance ripple markings, rain-drop impressions, and pseudomorphs 
of salt crystals, which, together with the beds of rock salt and 
gypsum which occur in this formation, show that it was deposited in 
a great continental salt lake, like the Dead Sea of the present era. 
The Boulder Clay is not, at first sight, easily distinguishable from 
the Red Marl, but a close investigation will show that there is often a 
top layer of clay of very much better quality, commercially speaking, 
than the Red Marl below; a fact of which the brickmakers of the district 
are well aware. Mr. W. J. Harrison, F.G.S., first called attention to 
a section at Small Heath, where the white bands of the Red Marl were 
* Abstract of Paper read before the Birmingham Natural History and 
Microscopical Society, 23rd January, 1883. 
