A NOTE ON S. B. J. SKERTCHLY AND THE BRANDON BEDS

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Suffolk Natural History, Vol. 46

A NOTE ON S. B. J. SKERTCHLY AND THE BRANDON BEDS In 1877, S. B. J Skertchly’s Geological Survey Memoir on the Geology of the Fenland gave a Table of the Fenland Beds which referred to a unit of sands, gravels and clays below boulder clay, containing Palaeolithic implements near Brandon, and also represented by brick-earths near Brandon. A year later, in The Fenland Past and Present (Miller & Skertchly, 1878), Skertchly described in detail, as a unit of stratigraphy, the Brandon Beds, older than a boulder clay in the Brandon region. The unit included clays, brick-earths, sands and gravels, usually well-stratified, and in the case of the brick-earths often very finely laminated. This description is the fullest account of the Brandon Beds given by Skertchly, and it is evident that at that time the term included a wide variety of sediments. By 1878 Skertchly had finished his survey of Fenland (in 1875) and moved to Brandon. Here, he began to make a record the gun-flint industry centred on Brandon and to survey the geology of the area. The results of the former were published in the Memoir on The Manufacture of Gun-flints (Skertchly, 1879) and the latter in the Memoir on The Geology of parts of Cambridgeshire and Suffolk (Whitaker et al., 1891). Skertchly discussed in detail the relation of the Brandon Beds to boulder clays in The Fenland Past and Present and in the Gunflint Memoir. He examined them in 30 different localities, noting their relation to boulder clays in each. He found they were strongly associated with boulder clay, usually underlying boulder clay, though at some localities there was boulder clay above and below, and in others boulder clay below. In the Gun-flint Memoir Skertchly summarised his evidence of the relation of Palaeolithic Man to the stratigraphy of glacial deposits in eastern England. In his tabulation (though not in the text) he restricts the term Brandon Beds to brick-earths ‘hitherto only recognised in Norfolk and Suffolk’, and associates them the ‘Early Palaeolithic’. He illustrated the position of the Brandon Beds in a local geological context in a long geological section (Fig. 62: c, Brandon Beds with palaeolithic implements) at Botany Bay, north-east of Brandon (GR TL808893). Skertchly was particularly interested in the relation of palaeoliths to the brick-earths, since he was heavily involved in the disputes of the time about the age of man in relation to glacial sediments such as boulder clay. He regarded the brick-earths as interglacial, with the use of the term ‘interglacial’ indicating the presence of non-glacial sediments, rather than as a term based on palaeontological evidence for climatic amelioration (see West, 1963, Fig. 1). Skertchly’s discoveries in the Brandon area on the relation of brick-earths with palaeoliths to glacial sediments greatly excited J. Geikie, who, when he heard of them, added a postscript describing them to the second edition of his book on The Great Ice Age (Geikie, 1877; see also the Preface). When the 1891 Memoir, containing Skertchly’s observations, came to be published, Skertchly’s term Brandon Beds was regarded by the Editor as ‘hardly needed’. By that time Skertchly had left the Geological Survey, and had travelled the world, settling in Australia in 1894 (Forrest, 1983). The

Trans. Suffolk Nat. Soc. 46 (2010)


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