Page:The South Staffordshire Coalfield - Joseph Beete Jukes - 1859.djvu/47

Rh shaft. But inasmuch as the surface of the ground rises rapidly to the south, while the beds fall, that rise being at least 100 feet in the 450 yards, we get over the head of the gate-road a thickness of beds above the Thick coal of not less than 977 feet. Let us, then, suppose the beds to be absolutely horizontal from the end of the gate-road to Hasbury Hill, south-west of Halesowen, which those near the surface certainly are for the greater part of the distance, we must still add another 70 feet for the total rise of ground from Hawn to Highfields. Hasbury, when we shall have a thickness of at least 1,000 feet between the uppermost beds seen there and the top of the Thick coal.

The details of the beds passed through in the Hawn shaft are not known, but the high ground on all sides of it is composed of greenish brown sandstone, dipping generally at a very gentle angle to the south. In the lane leading from Hawn to Gosty Hill, these sandstones are conglomeritic, and many of the pebbles consist of fragments of trap, not, however, of basalt or greenstone, but of brown and purple porphyry (or felstone) very like some of those so abundant in the Permian rocks of the Clent Hills. It appears, therefore, that fragments of such rocks began to be drifted from some rather distant locality even during the Coal-measure period.

These beds and those quarried near Halesowen are probably below the sandstones of Luticy and Wassel Grove, in which the little beds of coal before mentioned occur, for the places where these coals occur are both further south and on higher ground than that round Hawn and Halesowen.

Mr. G. Thompson, formerly manager of the British Iron Company's Works at Corngreaves, communicated the following section of the pit sunk at Wassel Grove.