xlii 
PROCEEDINGS OF THE 
The road leading to Shenley was taken for a short distance, 
when, by permission of Mr. Thomas Bagnall, Newberries Park was 
entered. After walking through the grounds adjoining the house, 
a meadow near the park was crossed, and an opening in it not 
easily found revealed the only existing exposure of the Hertfordshire 
conglomerate. 
Newberries was visited by the Society four years ago, hut this is 
the first time the Geologists’ Association has had the opportunity 
of seeing the Hertfordshire conglomerate in situ. On this occasion 
it was examined under by no means favourable auspices. It was 
necessary to walk for a sufficient distance through wet grass to add 
materially to the discomfort, to the ladies of the party especially, 
of a walk in the rain, and moreover there was no geologist present 
who was well acquainted with the strata of which the conglo¬ 
merate forms a part—the Woolwich and Heading Series. The rain, 
however, now ceased, and the director of the meeting and writer of 
this report gave the following account of the conglomerate in its 
relation to the strata in which it occurs, repeating in the course 
of his remarks a few observations which he made on the occasion 
of the former visit.* 
We are now, he said, as on several previous occasions when the 
two Societies have met together in Hertfordshire, standing on the 
edge of the London Tertiary Basin. We have examined the beds 
forming the outcrop of the Tertiary strata to the south-west at 
Woodcock Hill near Bickmansworth, and at Watford Heath and 
Bushey near Watford; and to the north-east at Hatfield and at 
Hertford. All along this line of outcrop we have had the Chalk 
on the north-west of us and the London Clay on the south-east, 
while immediately beneath our feet have been the sands, mottled 
clays, and pebble-beds of the Woolwich and Heading Series, reposing 
on the Chalk and overlaid by the London Clay, the only portion 
of which we could in some places see being its basement-bed. 
Underlying the Woolwich and Heading beds, on the opposite 
side of our Chalk basin, south of London, are the Thanet Sands, 
but on this edge of the basin they are absent, the Heading beds 
here reposing immediately on the Chalk, which appears to have 
suffered some amount of denudation before their deposition. They 
are very different in character to their representatives south of 
London. In the neighbourhood of Woolwich especially, clays in 
thin layers predominate throughout, and fossils are frequent, and 
show that the beds are of fluviatile or estuarine origin; here there 
is usually but one thick bed of mottled clay, with sands above and 
below, and quite at the base a bed of rolled flint-pebbles in sand, 
apparently a true shingle-bed. Eossils are seldom found, and the 
general character of the beds indicates a marine origin, part at least 
being a littoral deposit. 
It is this shore-deposit that we have now before us, for the Hert¬ 
fordshire conglomerate is merely the lowest bed of the Woolwich 
and Heading Series—the shingle-bed of flint-pebbles consolidated 
* See ‘ Trans. Herts Nat. Hist. Soc.,’ Vol. I, p. xxxiii. 
