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THE STONE BEDS IN 'STONEWORKS' QUARRY (extracted from Mona Clinch's book on the village (1938) |
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| No. |
Description |
Thickness (ft. in.) |
| 1 | Boulder clay | 11 6 |
| 2 |
Great oolite
clay, called " Rammel " Clay, very variegated,
green, yellow, brown, blue and black, full
of Ostrea Subrugulosa and containing
wood. |
1 9 |
| 3 | "Pendle" a hard close limestone, very heavy and blue-hearted (a good rough building stone). A zone at the bottom, occasionally abounds in echinoderms, also here probably occurred the fish Pholidophorus Fleshii. | 5 0 |
| 4 | Sandy band in thin layers or sometimes almost an oyster bed. | 0 9 |
| 5 | "Marly Bed" soft calcereous material, in two divisions containing numerous Pholadomyae - burnt for lime. | 2 4 |
| 6 | "Sandstone" an arenaceous limestone, soft, but hardening on exposure, in two divisions, with few fossils. [The primary host of ironstone in beds that sometimes amounted to 6ft thickness.] | 3 6 |
| 7 | "Bottom Marly Bed" very soft and ramelly, very full of fossils including Terebratula Maxillata. | 3 3 |
| 8 | Soft clayey band with some fossils and fish-palates | 0 6 |
| 9 | "The Blocks" an open, fully working oolite limestone containing Nautilus, Clypeus and ammonites gracilis. Sawn up and faced for flooring, window sills, chimney pieces etc. [The best material - sadly in a minority.] | 2 9 |
| 10 | Very hard blue-hearted stone with same fossils. | 1 2 |
| Descriptions of beds below 10, given by workmen, are too doubtful to be worth recording, but the situation probably resembles that at Easton Neston. Total thickness may be over 22 feet. [Note that in the fields that were open mined prior to WWII for ironstone, glacial action had removed layers 1, 2 and 3. Post-WWII mining at or near Rectory Farm had to deal with the entire overburden of limestone. In general, local terrain resulted in a considerable variation in strata thickness.] | ||