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

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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

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Editor of the Memoir commented: “For the loam or brick-earth below the Boulder Clay Mr Skertchly proposed the name Brandon Beds; but as this loam is endowed with older names, being probably the equivalent of part of the Lower Glacial, or of the Contorted Drift of Mr S. V. Wood, as it does not occur at Brandon itself (though there are patches in the surrounding country), and as it is developed in various other neighbourhoods, the name is hardly needed. Indeed it seems a questionable thing to give names to the division of the Glacial Drift, other than such lithological ones as are needful, and the term Glacial Loam is quite enough, for present purposes at all events.”

Here the Editor is regarding the brick-earth as a loam with glacial associations, rather than giving an interglacial (s.l.) significance.

A similar ‘official’ view of the Brandon Beds was given in the Memoir, also containing Skertchly’s observations, on The Geology of South-western Norfolk and of Northern Cambridgeshire (Whitaker et al., 1893). This contains the section at Botany Bay described by Skertchly in the Gun-flint Memoir, but bed c is described as ‘Loam,etc., with Palaeolithic Implements’.

Subsequently the term Brandon Beds fell out of use, But there seems no reason why the term cannot be retained to define the bed so clearly marked by Skertchly in his drawing of the Botany Bay sections, particularly since the sections would still be available with a bit of hard work and are available as a type section for the Brandon Beds. Interestingly, a graphic description of Skertchly’s robust discusssions with colleagues in this period is given in his autobiography (Skertchly, 1921).

However, since so much more is now known of the Quaternary succession in East Anglia, there could well be an argument for re-instating the Brandon Beds, taking the Botany Bay section as a type site. The fine sediments appear to fill parts of ancient valleys, and as Skertchly pointed out, they are strongly associated with boulder clays. Thus they may perhaps be interpreted as quietwater sediments formed in ponded water during a glaciation in the Fenland later than the Anglian glaciation. Evidence for such a glaciation is given by the presence eastwards of an overflow channel in the Little OuseWaveney valleys, leading to the North Sea area (West, 2007; 2009), and the evidence of Fenland glaciation at that time (Gibbard et al., 2009) In which case, the Brandon Beds brick-earths are coeval with a Fenland glaciation and they may indeed be below a diamicton or above a diamicton of this or an earlier glaciation.

References Forrest, A. J. (1983). Masters of Flint. Lavenham, Terence Dalton Limited.

Geikie, J. (1877). The Great Ice Age. 2nd ed. London, Daldy, Isbisker & Co. Gibbard, P. L., Pasanen, A. H., West, R. G., Lunkka, J. P., Boreham, S., Cohen, K. M & Rolfe, C. (2009). Late Middle Pleistocene glaciation in East Anglia, England. Boreas, 38: 504–528.

Miller, S. H. & Skertchly, S. B. J. (1878). The Fenland Past and Present.

London, Longmans, Green, and Co.

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Skertchly, S. B. J. (1877). The Geology of the Fenland. Memoirs of the Geological Survey of England and Wales. London.

Skertchly, S. B. J. (1879). On the manufacture of gun-flints, the methods of excavating for flint, the age of Palaeolithic Man, and the connexion between Neolithic art and the gun-flint trade. Memoirs of the Geological Survey, England and Wales. London.

Skertchly, S. B. J. (1921). Glacial Man: my part in his discovery. Proceedings of the Royal Society of Queensland, 33: 129–151.

West, R. G. (1963). Problems of the British Quaternary. Proceedings of the Geologists’ Association, 74: 147–186.

West, R. (2007) The Little Ouse River, the Waveney River and the Breckland: a joint history. Trans Suffolk Nat. Soc., 43: 35–39.

West, R. (2009). From Brandon to Bungay. An exploration of the landscape history and geology of the Little Ouse and Waveney Rivers. Ipswich.

Suffolk Naturalists’ Society.

Whitaker, W. (ed.) (1891). The geology of parts of Cambridgeshire and of Suffolk. Memoirs of the Geological Survey, England and Wales. London.

Whitaker, W. (ed.) (1893). The geology of south-western Norfolk and of Northern Cambridgeshire. Memoirs of the Geological Survey, England and Wales. London.

Richard West 3A Woollards Lane Great Shelford Cambridge CB22 5LZ

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