Walton-On-The-Naze ( Essex , Uk )

[DE&i]

Elliot and I are off to Walton-on- The- Naze tomorrow 08/02/2014 , we shall be setting off at 8.00am GMT with the intention to arrive at the Naze for 10.30am GMT.

With the recent storms we’ve had and low tide scheduled for 1.08pm GMT there should be some decent exposure of Red Crag with gastropods and molluscs to be found. And sharks teeth, bird bones, fish vertebrae, seeds and wood from the surrounding London Clay.

If we are really lucky we may find a tooth such as this one , washed out from the Red Crag Formation.

Ill post photos to my Out In The Field website as we go along if you’d like to check on our progress.

Then also to the TFF ASAP with our report back plus photos.

Regards,

D&E.

[Auspex]

Have a good time, and be careful out there!

[Kosmoceras]

Good luck both of you! I can't wait to return there myself; hope the storms have made it productive for you. I must echo what Chas said, when I went there were some small Red Crag slips and a decent sided lump came down onto the beach near to me - stay away from the cliffs. Can’t wait for your report and some photos of what you find.

All the best,

Thomas

[DE&i]

Thanks guys...our safety is paramount i can assure if things are looking the slightest precarious then it will be just a couple of hours sieving through the shingle.

Regards,

Darren.

[Taogan]

Hope you're not being premature - the storms aren't due to finish until the middle of the day. Rain and 30mph wind until lunchtime, but good luck. I'm leaving things for another day or two before going out to Sheppey.

[cowsharks]

Thanks guys...our safety is paramount i can assure if things are looking the slightest precarious then it will be just a couple of hours sieving through the shingle.

Regards,

Darren.

What is the "shingle"? Is that the beach sands/gravels or is it the stuff that comes out of the cliffs?

Daryl.

[jpc]

Find some bird bones...

Daryl... shingle is what makes up English beaches. At least the fossiliferous ones I have been to. It is indeed the gravel that accumulates on the shore where a nice Florida beach,,, or even under Calvert Cliffs... has lots of sand.

[DE&i]

Walton-on-the-Naze report back;

It was 6.30am...A good time to start monitoring weather forecasts for today. After a god half hour of searching on the internet the forecasts weren’t looking promising. All of them were pretty much the same (30 mph winds / rain all day / wind-chill factor 1 degree Celsius).

7.00am and its time to decide, I hear Elliot stumbling down the stairs asking where his wellington boots are. We sit down and chat and both decide its better if I go without him, he reminds me he’s got a lot of home-made play dough to make today.

So I get going around 8.00am for the 2 and 1/2 hour car journey to Walton-on-the-Naze to meet some members of the UKAFH at The Naze for 10.30am.

The numbers are low at the meeting point 6 of us in total most put off by the weather, but to be honest it was quite windy and cold at the top of the cliffs where the car park was. But as we walked down onto the beach there was very little wind and the sun came out for the rest of the day with no rain what so ever.

Now bearing in mind Walton-on-the-Naze yields many fossils from the London Clay and Red Crag, however most of these are found during the right conditions often after extensive scouring. So today as we found out it really was a "look very closely" and a “on your knees” job.

Some scenery photos I took:

This photo I took are the sediments exposed in situ along some of the 1.5km stretch of foreshore and cliff between Walton-on-the-Naze and Pennyhole Bay in the north which to the London Clay and Red Crag formations, and are topped by several metres of Pleistocene sands and gravels. Although the Red Crag directly overlies the London Clay at Walton-on-the-Naze it was deposited 51 million years later. The sediment deposited in the interim, which included much of the London Clay, was eroded away and in part contributes to the pebble bed at the base of the Red Crag. This kind of erosive junction between two beds of differing ages is referred to as an unconformity i.e. the Red Crag unconformably overlies the London Clay. The WHITE LINES are the junction beds .The YELLOW ARROW indicates sands and gravels Pleistocene Epoch / Middle Stage c.0.5 mya . The GREEN ARROW indicates the Red Crag formation Pliocene Epoch / Piacenzian Stage c.2.5 mya. The BLUE ARROW indicates the London Clay formation Eocene Epoch / Ypresian Stage c.54 mya. The BLACK ARROW indicates the London Clay formation Eocene Epoch / Ypresian Stage c.54 mya.

The Naze geology is here at this LINK which will give you a very good description of the surrounding area.

Edited February 9, 2014 by DarrenElliot

[DE&i]

Continued:

These Bivalves and Gastropods are stained orange from iron oxides and are from the Red Crag 2.6 million years old Late Pliocene Early Pleistocene :

1 Glycymeris glycymeris

2 Turritella communis

Various sharks’ teeth:

Fish Vertebra :

Possible foot cast or just wishful thinking , i found this near the piece of flint i found.

The flint could have originated from Norfolk just like the new Neolithic foot prints discovered http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/science-news/10625268/Oldest-British-human-footprints-were-million-to-one-discovery.html

All in all it was a great windswept day , I shall return there was a lot of other specimens to collect of various sorts of which for some reason or another I didn’t pick up i.e. ( is this a pyrite twig or bird bone ! ).

The other members of the group also found quite a few bits and bobs I’ll ask them to send me some photos and post them on the TFF.

Edited February 11, 2014 by DarrenElliot

[DE&i]

Continued :

Common pieces of Neolithic/Early Bronze age mostly arrowheads and blades can be found along the Naze. The flint from which the later pieces are made came here from Grimes Graves in what is now Thetford Forest on the Norfolk/Suffolk border near Brandon. Not sure if this is such a piece but perhaps someone here could tell me.

Regards,

Darren.

[xonenine]

thanks for such a great trip report Darren, I enjoyed "going along"

Carmine

[Auspex]

His decision, based on the expected weather, was a good one, but I hope Elliot is not too disappointed.

[jpc]

Play dough?

[DE&i]

Play dough?

Yep play dough...Elliot has lots of dinosaur cookie cutters , so we decided to make job lots of the stuff ( its cheaper than the original play doh ) . To take around his younger cousins house to cut out dinosaur shapes together.

Heres the recipe :

http://m.instructables.com/id/How-to-Make-Playdough-Play-doh/

Regards,

Darren.

[Kosmoceras]

Well done Darren for a safe decision. The Naze can be unpredictable with the amount to be found, some days are better than others. Like the fish vert...

[painshill]

Hi Darren (and Elliot)

Looks like you’re having real fun there.

Responding to the mail you sent drawing my attention to this thread.

The flint mines at Grimes Graves are late Neolithic and date from no earlier than about 3,000 BC. There are plenty of other flint sources in the vicinity of Walton on the Naze and so there is no particular reason to believe that flint artefacts found there were produced using material that came originally from Grimes Graves. The same is true for the Happisburgh site (for the benefit on non-Brits, it’s pronounced ‘Haysburra’). Plenty of good quality flint in that area too.

As for what you found, it does look like it may be a worked piece. The uniface oval nature of it, with a central ridge running down the other side suggests it might be a crude Late Neolithic scraper (rather than a knife, since it has no secondary edge work as far as I can see - or a perform/blank, since it’s uncharacteristically uniface). The late Neolithic is very much characterised by these kinds of “quick and dirty” expedient tools and a probability that they were made without much care for some immediate task and then discarded.

When items have that degree of weathering and are isolated finds without some associated stratigraphy to back them up, it’s not only difficult to reliably assign them as tools, but pretty impossible to date them. If you wanted me to put my money down based on the pictures only, I would say there’s a 50% chance of it being a flake tool and – IF it is, a virtual certainty of it being late Neolithic or into early Bronze Age.

The footprints at Happisburgh are very much older than any other occupation sites we know of in the UK. They’re Lower Palaeolithic and date to around 800,000 years ago. Although no human fossils have been found, the other evidence suggests they were made by Homo antecessor (which may or may not be the same species as H. heidelbergensis) and the tool industry is characteristically very crude.

The earliest known settlers in the Walton on the Naze area were Homo erectus sometime around 400,000 years ago. They had two tool industries - the Clactonian industry, leading to the Acheulean tool industry, with considerable overlap. The two industries were running in parallel for a long time, but were believed to have been used by different groups since the Clactonian appears to come to a dead end. The type site for the Clactonian industry (Europe’s derivative from the Oldowan industry of Africa) is actually only a few miles from Walton on the Naze and you will certainly find such tools near (but not in) the Red Crag. The tool industry is characterised by crude chopper tools, large flakes taken off cores by hard-hammer percussion (which normally have a single and very large bulb of percussion), no significant retouch, no edge working and a complete absence anything bifacial. The central apex ridge and absence of a prominent bulb of percussion or a striking platform would indicate it’s not from that tool industry.

These “Mode 1” tools carried on into the Acheulean with greater refinement, soft-hammer percussion for retouch/edge working and exploitation of bifaces, leading to the true hand-axe (which the Clactonian did not have).

There’s no reason why you couldn’t find human footprints in lithified sediments (or recently exposed unlithified sediments as at Happisburgh), but they’re rare occurrences and frankly that doesn’t look like a footprint to me. Only the stratigraphy would tell you whether a footprint was associated with tools found nearby but you generally have to get pretty lucky to make those kinds of connections.

Incidentally, there is a long history of controversy about so-called artefacts coming out of the Red Crag, claimed as evidence for a much earlier “pre-Palaeolithic” occupation of Britain. Items resembling lithic tools - referred to as “eoliths” - are regarded by all mainstream archaeologists as having been formed by natural processes such as glaciation. There are other controversial (but generally discredited) items too, such as these:

“Sling” stone:

http://www.badarchaeology.com/?page_id=266

Shell with “carved” face:

http://www.badarchaeology.com/?page_id=245