Field excursion to Welton-le-Wold, May 21st 2006

The 2006 field season opened with a trip to Lincolnshire, to examine Pleistocene sequences in quarries near the small village of Welton-le-Wold, west of Louth. We were fortunate to secure the services of John Aram as leader, as he had been studying the old quarries for several years. The weather was not kind and a gloomy morning was followed by very heavy rain during lunch and for the whole afternoon. It was about the wettest excursion I could remember, yet the small but select group tried hard to keep its spirits up and enjoy the excellent geology. We began in what must have been, when working, a very large gravel pit, now conserved to show a long face of Pleistocene tills. These were very variable and questions about the number of tills and their relationship to one another were soon occupying our minds. In places it seemed as though an underlying (stratigraphically) unit had been thrust over a younger one, and it was also clear that water lain deposits were also present, possibly contemporary with strata we saw last year in Warwickshire. John admitted that despite 5 years study, he was still confused about the relationships and ages of these tills.

It was while we were eating our lunches in the cars that the rain that had been threatening all morning finally started, and it was of the heavy persistent variety. Nevertheless, rain has never (well, rarely) put a geologist off his quarry, so off we went across a narrow road and some fields to our next locality. That was more or less a continuation of the one we saw in the morning, but showed some very interesting differences, including one till that wasn’t present at the first site. It was apparent that we were literally standing at a spot where ice flows were grinding to halt, at the maximum extent of their journey south. All that made a wonderful story and on a finer day, your scribe at least would have been happily involved for much longer. But by that time the rain was getting through to the skin and we had to call a halt, making sure we thanked John for his keen and informative leadership.

Andrew Swift

The group near the information board in the first Welton-le-Wold quarry.

L-R Mike Howe, Ron Johnson, John Aram (leader), Graeme Norris, Andrew Swift, Carolyn Evans, Mark Evans, Joanne Norris, Peter Long (photo June Norris)

Thrust and folded tills and ?glacial lake deposits in the Welton-le Wold quarry face (photo Andrew Swift)

Homeward bound, very wet (photo Andrew Swift)