children approached. The brave one asked him if he had caught anything, but he said
no, he had only just arrived. But he threw lots of bright-coloured gentles into the water
and caught a fish, which he gave to one child to hold for a few seconds, then another for
the other child. Each fish was quickly returned to the river, but the children were
fascinated. So was I, as the man said the first one was a Dace, and the second one a
Chub, both young ones, roughly sardine size. Initially I found the differences hard to
detect, especially as we did not see the two together but sequentially. Looking up in a
book at home I could see the differences that had been pointed out to me. This is
another area of natural history of which 1 am totally ignorant. What a lot there is to learn
about, even on my own doorstep.
The first weekend in March we went to Pakefield, just south of Lowestoft, Suffolk (yes,
not quite Essex!), for a jazz festival, which we very much enjoyed. We stayed at the
Pontins holiday camp, which is close to the beach above the cliffs. Most of the
considerable length of these cliffs (most of Suffolk, into Norfolk) is SSSI for the geology.
The cliffs have a substantial amount of sand dumped by glaciers, which tends to collapse
in winter storms when the lower layers are removed by the waves. In 1994 one storm
removed nearly 1 metre depth of beach and scoured the lower beds out, exposing older
deposits of boulder clay with famously good fossils (the Cromer Forest-bed Formation).
Later, a slip from the top occurred. This was all at Pakefield, immediately below the
Pontins camp (see Plate 2). You can easily see there are still small trees hanging upside-
down by their roots, and heaps of sand are visible along the bottom, covering up the
early beds. In this exact spot two amateur geologists, Paul Durbidge and Bob Mutch,
found lots of fossil mammal bones from the old boulder clay beds, and also some worked
flints ie made by old hominid hands. When they started digging in the cliff-face, near
the bottom, knee-deep in icy water at high tide, they, now supervising other excited
scientists, found the stratum from which the flints had come, and found more. This
enabled the flints to be dated, and they had been worked about 700,000 years ago. This
date was 200,000 years earlier than any other worked stones in northern Europe. The
workers were not our modern humans, Homo sapiens, or even the earlier Neanderthals,
but perhaps their ancestors. The news broke a few months ago, but here we saw the
cliffs for ourselves. So far, no hominid bones have been found, but hope springs
eternal..... Durbidge and Mutch are now famous; their names will go down in history,
showing what amateurs can still contribute and discover.
When we got home, the night temperature had dropped to -8°C at some point, and
neighbours told us of brilliant sunshine, occasional snow showers, and sharp frosts, just
as we had had in Suffolk. As March continues, it is milder, with a good spell of rain.
Once again, March has come in like a lion, but goes out like a lamb.
Essex Field Club Newsletter No. 50, May 2006
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