GEOLOGY
The county of Worcester consists for the most part of a wide undulating plain of red Triassic marls and sandstones, and of grey Liassic, clays and limestones, overspread in places with sundry superficial gravels. It is bordered on the west by the bold though somewhat tiny mountain range of the Malverns, which rises to a height of 1,394 feet in the Worcestershire Beacon, and extends northwards to the Abberley Hills, which attain a height of 779 feet. On the north the county comprises portions of the Forest of Wyre and South Staffordshire coalfields, while towards the north-east there is again a remnant of a mountainous region in the Lickey Hills, and in the older rocks of Dudley, which appear from beneath coverings of the newer strata. Hence three great groups of rocks are represented ; (1) the older rocks of Malvern, Abberley, the Lickey and Dudley, together with the coalfields; (2) the Red rocks and Lias of the plains; and (3) the superficial gravels. With the Lias we may include the Oolitic series, which is represented on Bredon Hill and in some isolated portions of Worcestershire in the northern Cotteswold Hills.
It has been shown in recent papers by Prof T. T. Groom that the Malvern Hills exhibit all the characteristic features of a folded mountain range. There the older rocks have been disturbed and bent into anticlinal folds, and these inverted and faulted have become ‘thrustplanes,’ whereby older strata have in places been thrust or pushed over newer rocks. In his opinion this ancient range first arose during late Carboniferous times, and was much faulted and denuded before the Permian and Triassic and succeeding deposits were spread over and against it. Consequently there is a great break between the older rocks and the ‘New Red’ strata[1] which rest irregularly on any of them, filling hollows in their worn surfaces. Along the ranges of the older rocks the denuded anticlines exhibit portions of formations the most ancient anywhere known. These, Archaean or Pre-Cambrian in age, occur on Malvern, at Martley, and at Barnt Green in the Lower Lickey Hills, and they truly form portions of what have been termed by Prof Bonney ‘the Foundation-stones of the Earth's Crust.’
ARCHAEAN
The geology of the Malvern Hills has naturally attracted the attention of geologists. The earliest description of the hills was that of Leonard Horner (1811), and the next important account was that of Murchison in his great work on ‘The Silurian System’ (1839). To John Phillips, however, we are indebted for the earliest elaborate account of this and adjoining tracts.[2] Since then the researches of a Worcester man, Dr. Harvey B. Holl,[3] of the Rev. W. S. Symonds (formerly Rector of
- ↑ This term is conveniently applied to both Permian and Triassic rocks, as they consist mainly of red strata.
- ↑ ‘The Malvern Hills, compared with the Palaeozoic districts of Abberley,’ etc., Mem. Geol. Survey, vol. ii., pt. I, 1848 ; see also Geology of Oxford, etc., 1871, p. 58.
- ↑ Quart. Journ. Geol. Soc. vol. xxi. p. 72.
