A Glacier Crushed This Part of Britain: The Mark Is Still Visible Today

Beacon Hill is the highest point in the whole county of Norfolk. Stand on it and it feels like solid, ancient ground. It is not. Walk down to the sea cliffs a few minutes away and the chalk is doing something it should never do. Chalk forms dead flat, grain by grain, on the floor of a sea. Here it stands tilted, folded and faulted, metres above where it was made. Retired Ordnance Survey surveyor Gordon walks the North Norfolk coast, from Beacon Hill and the Cromer Ridge to the cliffs at Overstrand, Sidestrand, Trimingham and West Runton, and reads what the Anglian ice actually did to this ground. What is the real mark a glacier leaves behind? Is it an old scar you drive out to photograph... or is it still being made, right now, while you stand there? A plain account of one stretch of British coast, told in the order the ground itself would tell it: surface first, then down, then the part that is still happening. Chapters, sources and figures are read off the published geology and the survey record, checked when this was written. Deep-time dates get revised as new work comes in. Treat the numbers as the best current reading of the ground, not the last word. #geology #Norfolk #IceAge