Description of the Remains of numerous Fossil Dicotyledonous Trees in an Outcrop of the Bottom Coal at Parkfield Colliery, near Bilston

Abstract

At a depth varying from forty to fifty yards below the Ten-yard stratum of the South Staffordshire coal-field, there are usually found three deposits of coal, called the Top , the New Mine , and the Bottom Coal . When these beds can be readily worked, they are scarcely inferior in value to the Ten-yard coal, the Top and New Mine deposit, with the intervening shales and partings, often forming a series of strata eight yards in thickness. Below this a few beds of ironstone occur; then a bed of fire clay about three yards in thickness, and immediately under this the Bottom Coal . At Parkfield Colliery, 1 ½ miles west of Bilston, and at about the same distance south of Wolverhampton, there is a fine outcrop of this Bottom Coal , which is now being got in open work. In one part the overlying fire clay has been removed, and the surface of the coal exposed, over an area of a somewhat triangular shape, for about 2,700 square yards. This terrace of coal exhibits on its surface one of the most remarkable accumulations of the fossil remains of the vegetation of the coal period ever exposed to view. There are upwards of seventy trunks of trees, apparently dicotyledonous, broken off close to the root, and several of them are more than 8 feet in circumference; the prostrate trunks lying across each other in every direction.