The New Forest 
Let's Go Geologizing (and fly a kite)!

Understanding what one is looking at on the ground adds greatly to the experience of touring the New Forest near Southampton. Because New Forest landforms are subtle, a keen eye is necessary to discern and decipher the clues of gravel shape, stream form, hill slope, and vegetation type. Winter is a great time to view the land as well as the landscape.

Geological Development of the New Forest
The area of the New Forest is underlain by chalk, laid down in Upper Cretaceous seas between 99 and 65 million years ago. This chalk bed dips to form a basin, which filled during the Eocene (ca. 56-34 million years ago) with sediments from transgressing seas, freshwater lakes and rivers. These strata were eventually uplifted and tilted towards the south, so that today there is a progression [like a tilted loaf of sliced bread with the top crust representing the overlying gravel and the stacked slice surfaces exposed] from north to south in the New Forest:

• the Lower Bagshot beds of deltaic origin
• the Bracklesham Beds of alluvial sand over clay
• the Barton Clay of marine origin
• the Barton Sand bed of loamy sand
• the Headon Beds of loamy clay and marine shell marls

In the Pleistocene (ca. 2 million to 10,000 years ago), these slanted beds were overlain by alluvial gravels, which now only survive on the high points of all the above geological beds.

New Forest Landscapes: Cliffs, Hilly Terraces, U-shaped Valleys
Piper’s Wait is billed as the highest point in the Forest. Surprisingly, it is not a mountain but one of nearly 150 named forest carparks, located on a high gravel terrace at the northern end of the Forest. Bordered on the north by the Bracklesham escarpment, the terrace represents the original, undissected surface of the Early Pleistocene floodplain gravels. The braided streams that laid down these gravels were early versions of the Avon and Solent Rivers.

Today the Avon flows down the western side of the Forest, having cut a spectacular river cliff affording views westward to chalk hills from the Castle Hill carpark. On the south, the Solent is now a submerged river valley forming the 1.2 –8 km wide sea passage between the New Forest and the Isle of Wight. In the Early Pleistocene it was an eastward flowing river that was capable of cutting terraces from west to east, flowing across a more extensive amount of land exposed by lowered sea levels and eventually into the river that drained the dry basin of the North Sea.

Erosional valley

From Piper’s Wait, about twelve such terraces drop down to the sea, cut and filled successively during the Pleistocene. Unlike the highest terrace gravels, the middle terraces bear angular flints, indicating they were deposited by steep gradient streams which flowed across chalk — a substance now exposed to the surface only to the north and west beyond the New Forest. These middle terraces were heavily dissected in the Mid- to Late Pleistocene by small streams, but their U-shaped valleys have since been filled up with erosional deposits housing small bogs.


From Grass ‘Lawns’ to Heathland to Woods
The gravels forming the surfaces of the higher points in the Forest can support little but broad Calluna heathland. Exposed Bagshot and Bracklesham layers are also acidic and nutritionally poor, again hosting little but heather, gorse and self-sown Scots Pine. But the marine Barton Clay and Headon Beds and the loamy Barton Sands

Ornamental woodland

are less acid, supporting the Ancient and Ornamental Woodland in the north-central part of the New Forest and allowing brown forest soils to develop. Wide-open grass lawns are also a feature on the valley bottom silty river gravels accumulated over the Barton Sands.

While bogs are often thought to occupy the lowest point in the landscape, a tussock bog has formed on the hillslopes above Picket Brook. The water feeding this hillside bog comes from seeps along a hilltop juncture of overlying porous sands on impermeable clays. The tussock bog vegetation on the hillside is entirely different from the bracken on the sands of the hilltop above.




Geomorphology in Action

Point Bar in Linford Brook

Linford Brook, flowing beside the Linford Bottom carpark, affords several lessons in landscape change. A stream bank has been cut on the concave curve, with a deep pool at its base, while in the convex curve, a point bar of sand deposits is developing. On both sides of the meandering stream are abandoned oxbows, not lakes but boggy areas with different vegetation than that of the valley floor. A short walk away on Picket Brook is a nick point, a sudden drop in the floor of the stream of half a metre that indicates the uppermost reach of current erosional forces.

Nick point on Picket Brook

Most visitors to the New Forest enjoy the trees and wide-open views from the heathland, but few look under their feet to the history of the land itself. It is a story beginning with the chalky sediments accumulating from Cretaceous Seas. The chalk was then covered by a succession of seabed and coastal sediments, which were uplifted as dry land. In the Pleistocene when the sea coast was south of the Isle of Wight, the Solent flowed across the Hampshire Basin towards the east, cutting the terraces of the New Forest area, stepping down from north to south.

References:
Chaffey, John (2009) “Geomorphology of the New Forest, Hampshire”. Fieldwalk handout.
Anon. (1986) The New Forest Landscape. CCP 220. Cheltenham, Glostershire: Countryside Commission.

More interesting things from Japan

Automatic chain barriers to parking lots
Ok, I admit they aren't a necessity, but these chain barriers are pretty neat. When a car comes out of the parking lot, it triggers the automatic dropping of the chain down to the ground so the car can exit; then the chain is raised again in this cool gate-post structure. Good thinking!

Challenges to obesity
Again, England could take a clue from Japan. There, waist measurement rather than BMI is paramount. Unfortunately, the single measures they apply to men and women (separately) take no account of body height and bone structure. You can lose your job if your waist doesn't meet the required measurement. To help out people losing weight, not only are commuters encouraged to take the stairs instead of the escalators/ lifts, but how many calories you will burn by doing so are stated in some stations (here -2.0kcal on the "subway diet"). At least these signs make you think and remember so you can make a choice to walk instead of stand like an automaton.

Gog & Magog sculptures and walk

Gog and Magog are names from the Bible, specifically interpreted as a king and his kingdom, respectively. But as Christianity infiltrated Albion (the Isle of Britain), it appears that they became one person Gogmagog, leader of the giants overthrown by Brutus of Troy, according to legend.

Later, it appears the word split to refer to two people: Gog, the giant, and Magog, the Trojan warrior Corineus who killed the giant.  Gog and Magog are now feted as the traditional guardians of the City of London, where their postwar wooden sculptures, in Roman uniform, watch over the Guildhall interior.

Many fascinating legends and details surround these two, but here let's talk about tangible things. First, the original 14-foot guardians of Gog and Magog were made of "wickerwork and pasteboard" which lasted about 400 years before deterioriating. Two rounds of wooden sculptures have replaced them, but in 2006, new 14-foot wicker statues were created to showcase in the Lord Mayor's parade. After one parade three or four years ago, the statues were displayed in the Royal National Hotel lobby; otherwise they are kept at the Guildhall between parades. The wicker statues can next be seen in the Lord Mayor's Procession on Saturday, 10 November 2012.

The wicker-work Gog & Magog statues
for the Lord Mayor's Procession
(Courtesy of the Worshipful Company of Basketmakers)

But a different sort of Gog and Magog exist outside Cambridge. South of the city are the only hills visible for miles (the Urals in one direction!). About 70m in elevation, they tower over the flat fenlands. These are the Gog Magog Hills. It is possible they were named for legendary giants sleeping beneath them.

I recall the Gog Magog Hills now because they were the site of several wonderful walks, one at Christmastime, when living in Cambridge. They provided refuge from the flatness of Cambridge in the wooded uplands, gaining a good view over the plains. So this mountain-loving girl took solace in the Gog Magogs, unnecessary now living in a more topographically interesting place.

Durham coal-train track walks

Gorse blooming in January! It isn't usually
out until March-April.

Finally, the wind has stopped blowing and the sun has come out. Mind you, it's still warm for January (see the gorse), so we took a walk on one of the myriad paths following old railway lines criss-crossing the landscape.

All around Newcastle are villages developed around coal mines (remember the phrase "coals to Newcastle"?). These are called "pit villages" from having a coal pit, and to move the coal to market, small coal trains were used. When Maggie Thatcher broke the coal-miners strike in 1984, most of the pits were abandoned, tracks ripped out, and slag heaps landscaped.

It is difficult to imagine what the area, now green and increasingly wooded, looked like those days: with industrial waste scattered across the hills and mine shaft facilities towering over the villages. Today, one can walk for miles on the old rail tracks along river courses, across farmland and through woods on the Deerness Valley Walk, the Lanchester Valley Walk and the Brandon-Bishop Auckland Walk – all meeting the East Coast rail line between Langley Moor and Durham.

Our walk began at Deerness View Park, and an old map of 1900 on the signboard informed us this park was the site of an old coal mine, now a picnic area. We walked the Deerness Valley, enjoying the change of weather and all the dogs out being walked.

Walking on the Esh Winning rail siding on January 6th

Coal mines were everywhere in this region. When you buy a house in Durham, you have to have it surveyed to see if it's sitting over an abandoned coal shaft. As the University tore down houses last year to construct their new administration building on Stockton Road, they found a mine shaft and had to fill it with rubble before proceeding. Other legacies of the miners are the Durham dialect (not Geordie but "pit-yakking"!), and the numerous council sports facilities that were provided by the government for out-of-work miners.

Walk along the Browney

So, yesterday was the hottest September 30th in a hundred years! It certainly felt good...and deserved a country walk. So we went down to the River Browney and immediately spotted a dipper (Cinclus cinclus), "scudding low over water on whirring wings", as the bird book says they do. But instead of disappearing around a corner as stated, it stopped on a point bar and showed us its white breast. The bird book also says that dippers are "best found by watching up and downstream from bridges over suitable waterways", which is where we were over the River Browney on the A690.

   Once in Colorado, we saw five dippers in a row scud past us at a picnic site along a river. We could hardly believe our eyes, and the local shopkeeper at the pet food (bird seed) store simply didn't believe us at all. But we know what we saw...


From the Browney bridge near the Honest Lawyer pub, we took a path along the river established by the Woodland Trust. Lined with oak trees, acorns crunched underfoot. The path led into fields which are being returned to woodland by the Trust. We saw the fruits of our labors last year when we helped plant trees there; they are now leafing beyond the tall grasses that have invaded the fields. A truly lovely day...And now we hear that October 1st also broke a heat record, with 30° in Yorkshire!!



Kightley, C. et al. (1998) Pocket Guide to the Birds of Britain and North-West Europe. Sussex: Pica, p. 205.