Recent Papers on the Coast of England and Wales

Abstract

A considerable amount of interest has been taken in the coast and adjacent sea-floor of Great Britain s c the w r. It seems therefore worthwhile to call attention to papers concerned more particularly with the geographical and geological aspects of coastal morphology, which are scattered through very different types of journals, and so may easily escape the notice of those for whom they are intended. In our own Journal Miss M. A. Arber gave an account of the cliff profiles in Devon and Cornwall,1 and thus extended the observa? tions made known by her father in fThe Coast Scenery of North Devon' (1911). Recently W. G. V. Balchin, continuing his work on Cornwall has given us a paper on the high level surfaces and their relation to the coast of North Devon. J. Challinor added a chapter to his earlier work on the Cardigan coast in the form of a note on convex erosion slopes in North Cardiganshire,2 and E. H. Brown 3 has analysed comprehensively the erosion surfaces of the same area. These three papers are however only incidentally concerned with the coast. C. A. Cotton 4 discusses our south-western coasts, and thinks the morvan theory, slightly modified, explains their structure better than the fault theory outlined by Suess. He regards the English and St. George's Channels as old features. The deepening of the valleys, later drowned by the Flandrian transgression, took place in times of glaciation. He thinks the tempo of coastal erosion has been slow owing to the great width of the continental shelf. Thus shoreline details survive from an interglacial age. His explanation of the bevelled form of some of the cliffs depends on two cycles of erosion, and so differs from Miss Arber who regards the distribution of bevelled cliffs as being controlled by structure, especially jointing. Other differences of opinion arise over the rate of cliff retreat in relation to valley truncation and the preservation of raised beaches.5 Cotton also alludes to The Needles of the Isle of Wight 6 and regards them as the surviving remnants of a plunging cliff which has been subjected to lateral erosion by the sea. Cotton's treatment of these two problems is theoretical, and scarcely takes local details sufficiently into consideration.