Page:Quarterly Journal of the Geological Society of London, vol. 33.djvu/134

96 96 S. V. WOOD, JUN., AND F. W. HARHER ON THE seems to be of similar age to the bed in the Yare valley, and of the period of interglacial denudation discussed in this paper. A mile and a half to the south-west of this, in the cutting of the Lowestoft branch Railway adjoining the Waveney marshes, a bed of clay occurs under a considerable thickness of Middle Glacial sand and gravel; but it is too much obscured for us to say whether it is the same bed as that at the bottom of Oulton cutting, or whether it be the Contorted Drift, or even the Kessingland nuviatile bed. The lower part of the valley, where, instead of falling into the Sea at Lowestoft, it turns suddenly to the north-west to join the Tare, is distinctly excavated in the Lower Glacial beds, which are exposed in many places along the edge of the valley ; and the line of section XVI. shows not only the extent of the interglacial denuda- tion of the Waveney valley, but also the way in which the Middle Glacial is bedded around the least-denuded part of the Contorted Drift that rises through the high ground between the valley and the sea- cliff. This prominence of Lower Glacial beds seems to have formed the interglacial parting between the Waveney valley and some other valley which has been destroyed by the waste of the coast line, and the slope of which is now intersected longitudinally by the cliff between Yarmouth and Lowestoft. This lost valley was probably tributary to the nlled-up and now concealed continuation of the in- terglacial trough of the Waveney, to which we shall have presently to refer. The features exhibited by line of section No XVI., so far as the Contorted Drift is concerned, are similar to those in sections XX. and XXI. (pp. 104, 105), which illustrate our view as to the way in whinh the valleys of the Deben and Orwell and other valleys of South Suffolk have been interglacially excavated. The remnants of the Contorted Drift to which we have referred as exposed between Beccles and the source of the Waveney (where, with the exception of such exposures, the Lower Glacial beds are mostly concealed by the Middle and Upper Glacial) occur at the following places, viz. : — at a brick-kiln one mile E. by N. of Broome church and about three miles from Bungay ; at the Bath Hills opposite Bungay ; at Denton to the south-west of Bungay ; at a pit half a mile N.E. of Starston railway-station ; in several fine sections near Withersdale and Shotford bridge, in the neighbourhood of Harleston ; and at Diss railway- station, where it is contorted, and overlain by the Upper Glacial. The Lower Glacial pebbly sands occur at the base of the Bath Hills beneath the Contorted Drift (which has been denuded to small thickness) ; but the bed of pebbles exposed in a pit within the gardens of Ditchingham House hard by, which is full of molluscan remains, appears from the specific character of such remains to belong to the Crag, though the Chillesford Clay and most of the Crag also has here been denuded in the interval between the Crag and some part of the Glacial period. The peculiar character of the contorted drift everywhere is its variability ; and to this the exposures round Harleston form no exception.