Pootler

This is an introduction to my 'Deep Past' Series.  The task I have set myself is to produce a jargon-free summary of the origin and nature of the features of the landscape of this area, in a brief enough form to be readable on a mobile phone.  This involves many compromises. I don't wish to try your patience dear reader and that, together with a lack of screen space, means that this will be thin gruel.  I cannot pose as an expert so y ou will just have to trust that I have done some homework, mainly relying on brevity trying and sticking to mainstream explanations. If you can tell me how to improve this stuff without lengthening it, please do.  The general idea is that this series will cover the general features of the area. I will leave all finer detail to locally specific posts, most often the suggested cycling routes. The problem was always where to start.  The fact is that nearly everything we can see is the result of relatively chapters in Earth's eventful ...

In previous posts I covered the rock foundations of our hills and valleys, so now I will torture the analogy and look at the floor coverings. T his 4th post in the series starts from around 2.5 million years ago  which, in geological terms, is a distance from the present day no greater than the gaps in a country  bus timetable.  Effectively this is the  ice ages and their legacy.  It has always been the case that the constant and radical changes to the landscape and the climate over millions of years, made it hard to for a simple punter like me. to sift out simple cause and effect relationships. Now, as get closer to the present, the increasing amount of fine grained detail available makes it  even harder to simplify the story. So i f any professional paleogeologists are reading this, for the sake of your mental health, stop now.    At the point when when we left the last post, what is now South East England was still connected to Europe.  T...

Let's drag our bloodstained carcass out of the apocalyptic hole left by the second life-eradicating asteroid impact into the 'Tertiary' Period. The planet is very slowly becoming more recognisable, mercifully shorn of giant reptiles and with mammals, birds and leafy trees.  Apparently this isn't geo-politically woke terminology now and I should be giving the period the correct geo-pronoun which is (I think) the Danian Age in the Paleocene epoch in the Paleogene Period in the Cenozoic Epoch of the Phanerozoic Eon. (Point being, I am merrily skipping through around 5 of these Epochs and  20 Ages in this post and I want you to know just how much grit and gyp I am sparing you!) No quack remedy was going to cure the Planet's hangover from the Asteroid impact and the d ramatic fluctuations that had afflicted it so far, will continue. T he climate periodically morphing from icehouse to greenhouse.   T ectonic plates and the continents atop them continued to tootle  around ...