PINK SEALIFE

PRETTY PINK..

a brief history of WESTWARD HO!
Location: Devon

A brief history of Westward Ho!

Until 1863 Westward Ho! was just pastureland with a few farmhouses and ploughed fields. However the beach holds the earliest evidence of life in this area. An ancient forest and stone age remains are exposed at low tide .......




For the next 2 days the group was to study the coastal exposures of Carboniferous strata along the coast from Westward Ho! through to Hartland Point, and then south to beyond Bude at Milhook. A brief outline of the geological history of this area is given below.

Before the super continents of Laurasia and Gondwanaland came together to form Pangea in Carboniferous times around 300 Ma the area now known as North Devon was on the southern margin of Laurasia. To the north were the Old Red Devonian Mountains and it was the erosion of the mountains that provided most of the material that flowed south to fill the huge Culm Basin located on the continental shelves of the two converging super continents. The particular part of this synclinorium of relevance to the study of the North Devon cliffs has been named Lake Bude. During late Devonian and early Carboniferous times this basin was filled with deep water sediments in the centre and thick shallower water sediments of sands and muds at the margins. The various stages of basin fill are highly complex but in essence a series of sediment wedges pro-grading southwards, were formed from the erosion of the Welsh mountains.

Whilst the basin was being filled the two super continents collided leading to the creation of the Variscan mountains and the compression of the intervening basins to produce dramatic folding and faulting of the sediments in Lake Bude. The eroded surface of these mountains is now visible in the cliffs of Westward Ho, Hartland Quay and Milhook and it is the folding and faulting that took place at depth that the group was to study in the next two days.

Starting from Westward Ho!