NOTES ON THE GRAVEL IN EPPING FOREST. 75
"Forest Hotel" Chingford. A short distance east of the
"Forest Hotel," and on the southern side of the road, a gravel
pit was dug last summer. To about 6 feet from the surface the beds
consist of brown, clayey-sand, with a few scattered pebbles of rolled
flint. The uppermost 2 feet of this sand had weathered to a grey
colour. Below this clayey-sand a good pebble-bed was found,
about 8 feet thick, and of similar composition to that of the two
other beds; the larger flints and drift rocks being at the lowest
depth, as in the "Earl's Path" pit.
Buckhurst Hill. The gravel pits behind the "Roebuck Inn"
contain only small rolled flints, without quartz or quartzite, as
far as I have been able to observe; and the pits seemed to have
produced nothing else but this kind of gravel since they were noted
by Professor Prestwich, who refers to them as Bagshot.
The Gravel in the Forest lies very irregularly, the hollows in the
London Clay which it fills varying from 1 or 2 feet to nearly 20 feet
in depth. Thus, while the pit near the "Forest Hotel," at Chingford,
shows about 14 feet of gravel, on the north side of the road a few
yards distant water, marking the nearness of the underlying clay, is
seen at a depth of 4 feet.
In the "Proceedings of the Geologists' Association," for August,
1891 (vol. xii., p. 108), Messrs Monckton and Herries in an inter-
esting paper on some "Hill Gravels North of the Thames," call
attention to the "hollows" in the London Clay, alluded to above,
but I think the deeper sections to which I have referred have been
opened since.
In addition to the quartz and quartzite already named, there are
some pieces of grit and also of very hard black flinty rock, much
worn. Mr. Clement Reid very kindly examined some of the
specimens I have collected, and he is of opinion that they belong to
the Northern Drift. As yet no Boulder Clay seems to have been
exposed in what now constitutes the Forest district, though Mr.
T. V. Holmes has found it further south at Hornchurch.2 These
foreign rocks of Epping Forest are similar to those in the Drift at
Hatfield Heath, Chelmsford, etc , but the masses of veined quartz
and hard block-flint are not quite so large.
2 Essex Nat. (vol. vii.. pp. 1-14).