Excursion Report - Middle and Upper Jurassic of Oxfordshire

11th July 2009

Leader Owen Green (Oxford University)

15 members met on a fine day at the quarry near the village of Kirtlington to examine the Bathonian succession there as a starting point for a shelf-basin transect of the Jurassic geology of Oxfordshire. Kirtlington Quarry is an SSSI site and part of the McKerrow trail. During the Bathonian the Oxford area formed part of an emerging land mass and leader Owen Green had designed the day to follow the deposits from a near shore to offshore setting through time. The quarry was very picturesque on this fine summer’s day, a day of weather no-one expected after earlier gloom and rain as we drove down.

Happy now the weather’s cleared up! At Kirtlington Quarry © Andrew Swift

From Kirtlington we drove five miles east to the village of Islip and the churchyard of St Nicholas. Here we saw the grave of William (‘Dean’) Buckland (1784-1856), in his time the first Professor of Geology at the University of Oxford, Dean of Westminster and also Rector of the parish of Islip. A blue plaque commemorates his residency in the rectory. We discussed Buckland’s famous eccentricities, which included keeping a Brown Bear and a hyena amongst his menagerie of animals. His wife is also interred in the grave, she was a long-suffering lady who thought nothing of rolling out pastry, in the middle of the night, so that Buckland could allow his tortoise to walk across it in order to make sense of the dinosaur footprints he had seen that day! Our next stop was in the village of Wheatley, where a small old quarry exposure in the playing field allowed us to examine the first of the many facies changes we saw in the day, this being the most distal outcrop of the Coral Rag facies.

We then moved into Oxford city after doing battle with the incessant heavy traffic, and to Headington Quarry. A geologically-themed open day was in full swing and we were also able to look closely at a reef in the old quarry, one of the many facies variants in the Oxfordian strata. Visitors to the open day could make plaster casts and examine examples of the fauna found locally, including some sponges from the Faringdon beds. We were offered light refreshments while Owen made available his expertise to the other visitors.

(Right) At Buckland’s grave in Islip churchyard © Andrew Swift

After lunch we walked ‘just around the corner’ (sic.) to view Magdalen Quarry. Here more facies variations could be seen and clear evidence was observed of deeper water deposits. Our final destination of the day was the village of Churchill, the birthplace of William ‘Strata’ Smith, to many the ‘Father of Geology’, although that is a title he would probably not have felt at all comfortable with. His life is celebrated at a small heritage centre, which is in fact the only remaining part (chancel) of the original village church. Smith was born in 1769 and his early life was spent as a surveyor chiefly involved in the construction of canals and the sinking of mine shafts. Artefacts and details of his charts, maps and other memorabilia are beautifully displayed, along with the work of local medical pioneers. While we were at the centre the Field Secretary thanked Owen for an excellent day’s geology and the excursion finished at 4:45pm with a walk to Smith’s memorial and a look at Churchill parish church, thought to be modelled on Christ Church, Oxford. Oh, and a last drink at the village pub!

That was the end of the ‘official’ day, but a hardy group of six fans of mysterious Britain went on to the nearby Rollright Stones, which were suitably eerie as the earlier morning gloom returned at the end of the day.

Helen Jones & Andrew Swift