Notes on the geology of the neighbourhood of Wells, Somerset / by Horace B. Woodward.

  • Woodward, Horace B. (Horace Bolingbroke), 1848-1914.
Date:
[1873]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Notes on the geology of the neighbourhood of Wells, Somerset / by Horace B. Woodward. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The Royal College of Surgeons of England. The original may be consulted at The Royal College of Surgeons of England.

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    cliffs are formed in the mountain limestone, and may be termed a serpentine gorge. The have evidently been worn away, not disrupted by any great convulsion, as popularly supposed. The dip of the strata on either side of the gorge coincides, and though possibly some crack which occurred during the elevation of the hills may have given the direction to the cliffs, they are clearly the result of gradual wearing away, of denudation, the result of the action of water. It has been asserted that the sea was the agent that wore them away,* but I can see no traces of its action. The tendency of the sea is rather to form long lines of cliff than narrow gorges. I am therefore inclined to look upon the Cheddar Cliffs as formed by the agency of rain and rivers, both with chemical and me- chanical action ; but whether originally as a cavern or not, it is hard to say. In North Wales there ax’e gorges formed by mountain torrents, which present on a small scale a resemblance to the Cheddar Cliffs —that particularly which runs from Pont-y-Pant to Bettws-y-Coed. The rocks here too are worn into curious hollows by the eddies and spray of the rushing water. At Cheddar the dip of the limestone has evidently had very great influence on the formation of the cliffs : on one side, the abrupt one, the dip being away from the cliffs exercises a conservative agency, whereas on the op- posite side the dip being into the ravine, a slope has been formed, the tendency being for the beds to break off and fall into the gorge. The Ebber rocks, a short distance from Wells form a gorge like Cheddar, though on a smaller scale, and differing from it in being in a more natural state. Instead of the * Mackintosh, Intellectual Observer, vol. xii. p. 30. See also Scenery of England and Wales, by the same author.