Excursion to Charlton. April 26th 1873 - Geologists' Association excursion
| From: A record of excursions made between 1860 and 1890. Edited by Thomas Vincent Holmes , F.G.S. and C. Davies Sherborn, F.G.S. London: Edward Stanford [For the Geologists’ Association], 1891. Source: Cornell University copy on the Internet Archive (Public domain work) |
[The following is the earliest report of a visit to Charlton that gives any description of the Section.]
Excursion to Charlton. April 26th 1873
Director—Professor J. Morris, F.G.S.. (Proc. Vol. iii. p. 205.)
[Another section is here given from St. John’s near Charlton which further illustrates the positions of the deposits in this locality] The well-known section at Charlton showing the junction of the English Secondaries and Tertiaries was first visited. Professor Morris, after pointing out to the large party assembled around him in the great chalk-pit, the general character of the Chalk and the Lower Eocene beds as they occur in the British Islands, described their foreign equivalents, and the beds which are probably intermediate in age between the Upper Chalk and the Thanet Sands of England. Though we find in our home section that the Thanet Sands appear to lie conformably on the Chalk, it is more than probable that we have lost some hundreds of feet of Chalk, either by sub-aerial or marine. erosion, or by decomposition after the deposition of the overlying sands. That some of the Chalk has been removed by decomposition is evident from the occurrence of the well-known bed of green-coated flints at the top of the Chalk, which bed must have been formed by the quiet and slow removal of the Chalk in which the flints were originally embedded. The Thanet Sands and the Woolwich and Reading Series are both of limited extent in England, the former formation extending only from Pegwell Bay to a little to the west of London; yet the Sables de Bracheux and the Argile plastique of the continent of Europe show us that the original extension of these formations was by no means inconsiderable.
From: Kent: Lewisham, Blackheath, and Charlton. [The sections at Lewisham and Charlton have generally been visited on the same day, and may therefore be conveniently grouped together here. The first excursion to Charlton took place on August 13th, 1860, and the report of its occurrence occupies four lines in the Proceedings (vol. i. p. 64). The first visit to Loampit Hill, Lewisham, was made in 1868, during the suspension of issue of the. Proceedings, while excursions were made to Charlton in 1866 and 1869, of which no report appeared. The Loampit Hill sections were inspected on May 7th, 1870 (Proc., vol. ii., p. 33), and again on April 25th, 1874, particulars of which follow.]