The Submarine Forest at the Alt Mouth

Abstract

On the shore at Great Crosby, Lancashire, stretching, at irregular intervals, for a space of about a mile nearly due north from a stream of water called Thornbeck Pool, are the remains of a forest, which have from time to time attracted considerable attention. It has been described by various observers, the earliest mention I know of being in the ‘Gentleman9s Magazine’ for 1796, p. 549, accompanied by an engraving, giving all the salient points which still distinguish the forest-bed. A view of these submarine forestal remains also forms the frontispiece of the memoir by Mr. C. E. De Rance on the “Superficial Geology of West Lancashire,” lately published by the Geological Survey. I have also described it in my paper on the Postglacial Geology of Lancashire and Cheshire*. As it has been pretty roundly asserted by some local observers that neither these trees nor those of the equivalent bed on the Cheshire shore are in situ , though I had no doubts of the fact myself, to set the question at rest I invited several gentlemen†, most of them members of the Liverpool Geological Society, to be present on the 19th of January, 1878, at the digging-out and uprooting of one of the stools of the trees, which are now rapidly diminishing in number by the denudation of the sea. A low stump was selected which had an oak trunk lying by it in a N.E. by E. direction, to all appearances in the position in which it had rotted