A Day's Elephant Hunting in Essex. 41
In the pits of the tile-kilns at Epping, in excavations
near Woodford, at Theydon Mount, and at many a spot
"familiar long but never truly known," the daylight has
now been let in upon the long-buried scene. The dried
glacial mud, the transported rocks and fossils and masses
of earth, may be seen and handled for ourselves. At
Epping we find, almost as abundantly as at Finchley, the
transported spoils of the Oolitic and Liassic districts of
England. We may identify almost to a certainty the
morainic accumulations of the land ice which once,
stretching from the chalk wolds on the east to the flank of
Charnwood Forest on the west, came down the eastern
side of England from the mountain districts of the north.
We pick up at Epping and Finchley alike, the well-known
incurved shells of the Gryphea, the curious belemnites, and
the hard pebbles and pellets of chalk from the Lincolnshire
rocks which were abraded by this ice to furnish materials
for our Essex and Middlesex boulder clay.
These solid memorials of a former climate, and of
terraqueous arrangements strangely different from those of
to-day, are yet only remnants of the once far-spreading
phenomena. Nature, as we shall see, has perpetuated on
a larger scale her achievements in the Glacial landscapes
around us.
RANGE OF THE ESSEX GLACIAL BEDS.
The extent and range of the Great Chalky Boulder Clay,
which is to explain for us some of the mysteries of the
Ilford elephant pits, has at length been fairly determined
both in Essex and elsewhere north of the Thames. North
of Epping it extends for many miles in an almost unbroken
sheet. From the eastern brow of the Valley of the Lea
in this northern area to the mouth of the Chelmer we
may travel on foot without once leaving Glacial ground.
Beyond the northern borders of Essex we should trace it
stretching through the Midland Counties to the chalk wolds
of Lincolnshire. As we come southward to the Valley of
the Thames, we are introduced to a later chapter in its
history. Broken and discontinuous, it becomes still more