On the western side of the Cove also the bedding is rather curved. At White Nore * the lower beds are hidden by an undercliff on the west, where there is but a very slight easterly dip ; but the general section is as follows : —
Irregular capping of flints and clay-with-flints all along the high cliff.
Chalk with many layers of flints, and some cream-coloured nodular layers ; one near the bottom of the first cliff is 1-1/2 foot thick; another, 2 feet below at one part, joins it in a distance of 20 or 30 yards.
Chalk without flints, or with very few flints, in part weathering roughly (in layers), as certain beds in the Dover and Beachy Head sections.
Chalk Marl, with flint-layers, and with a soft grey layer some 40 or 50 feet from the bottom, which, from its weathering away easily, has given rise to a slight ledge.
Upper Greensand. — The junction the same as at Durdle Cove &c.
I could not well make out the junction of the Upper and Lower Chalk, in the midst of the cliff ; it seemed to be faulted and nearly vertical.
From hence westward the Chalk leaves the coast for many miles, though it sometimes comes near the sea.
At a spring-head above Ringstead a small pit shows a vertical junction of Upper Greensand and Chalk Marl. There are a few flints in the latter ; and its bottom bed, with dark grains and quartz grains, is thicker than in the coast-sections above noticed. The same junction is again laid open by a road-section, about half a mile N.W. of Sutton Pointz.
From Upway westward to Portisham the Chalk is bounded by a fault, according to the Geological Survey Map, and consequently its bottom part does not crop out to the surface.
The next junction with the Upper Greensand that I saw is at a farm called " Higher Combe," about five miles east of Bridport, where the very bottom of the Chalk Marl is in the form of hard lumps, with some hard nodules (greenish outside), and fossils in plenty.
At Eggardon Hill† , N.E. of Bridport, the Upper Greensand forms rocky ledges at the base of the Chalk, the highest being of a more or less calcareous grit, and the next of irregularly weathered (? calcareous) sandstone, with dark grains and full of fossils. Between these is green-grey sand, full of stony nodules in the higher part, and, indeed passing up into the stone above. The grey rocks, clad with lichen, small ferns, and ivy, are very pretty. On turning from the side of the hill facing Powerstock, round the sharp ridge formed by the Upper Greensand, to the side facing seaward, the upper rock-bed is seen to crop out evenly along the flank, and to dip slightly southward ; whilst above it is the bottom Chalk Marl, with dark grains and quartz-grains ; 2 feet up the grains get fewer, and they are lost at about 4 feet.
Westward from Bridport the Chalk does not occur near the coast,
- So spelt on the Ordnance Map. Should it not be " White Nose " ? a fit name
for a chalk headland.
† Just in Sheet 18 of the Geological-Survey Map.
