Field Meetings

2006 Field Meeting Programme

We have had some excellent, well attended field trips this year, Dunwich and Covehithe to see the Norwich Crag exposures, Pakefield to observe the stratigraphy that has helped date the human artifacts found there, and to Happisburgh where an excellent pre-glacial hand axe was found. Although the policy of combining with other societies for such activities has been continued, that to Pakefield was purely a GSN activity; in spite of that we still had 27 attendees. Not bad for a Society with only ca. 120 members! Similar numbers attended the other trips.

The “Chillesford beds” of the Norwich Crag at Covehithe appear to be shallow water marine deposits laid down in shallow off-shore and beach conditions. They are usually described as indicating rising sea level. However your correspondent thought that there was more than one period of marine transgression to account for the observed thickness. So there was plenty of stratigraphic detail to see, with shallow water current bedding, mud-draped ripples etc. For me the bioturbated horizon at 1.5-2 m above the base of the cliff was particularly photogenic. There were sand in-fills of burrows in clay-rich sand, clay-rich infills of burrows in almost pure sand, and, more interesting, infills of iron- free sand in iron-containing sand.