On the Sand-Pit at High Ongar, Essex. 77
The sand thus disclosed was in the Geological Map which
I made from my own survey of Sheet 1 of the one inch to the
mile Ordnance issues (and which I in the year 1866 gave to
the Library of the Geological Society of London), shown as
the Lower Bagshot, with which in all respects it seems
identical; but the gentlemen of the Official Survey, when a
few years afterwards they worked over Essex, rejected this
view on the ground that the sand was at much too low a
level for it to be possible ; and at page 325 of vol. iv. of the
'Memoirs of the Geological Survey of England' they so state
and refer it to the Middle Glacial Sand and Gravel "c"
("c" of my late paper on the Newer Pliocene Period in
England).2
Although this sand and gravel is present under the chalky
clay near the head of the Roding Valley, at Fyfield on the
Roding, and at Moreton on the Cripsey Brook, and is repre-
sented by some crushed gravel beneath that clay at
Willingdale Spain, near Moreton, and also at Stapleford
Tawney, Theydon Mount, and Theydon Bois, and by some
gravel near the church at Stondon Massey, and Paslow Hall
Farm, which has the chalky clay hard by, though not over
it (having, so far as exposures reveal the case, been ploughed
out and destroyed elsewhere throughout this valley by the
ice which filled it during the formation of the chalky clay3),
yet none of this at all resembles the sand of the High Ongar
Pit, from which the gravel at Stondon and Paslow Hall Farm
is but a mile distant.
'Geological Magazine' for March, 1885, with a full list of his puhlished
papers, so many of which refer to the East Anglian district. To
Mr. Wood's kindness and readiness to take the greatest trouble in
affording information to enquirers, many besides ourselves would be
pleased to bear a testimony of gratitude.—Ed.]
2 ["The Newer Pliocene Period in England," Parts I. and II.
'Quarterly Journal of the Geological Society,' Vol. xxxvi. (1880), p. 457;
and Vol. xxxviii. (1882), p. G67. Mr. Wood has kindly presented
annotated copies of these papers, together with a series of explanatory
manuscript sections, to the Library of the Club (vide 'Proceedings,'
February 24th, 1883).—Ed.]
As described in the first part of my paper on the "Newer Pliocene
Period in England."