Bradley Fen Quarry, Whittlesey, Sunday August 17th 2003

  The extraction of Oxford Clay for brick-making in the Peterborough area has been in decline for many years, so it was a very pleasant surprise to hear a couple of years or so ago that Hanson Brick were opening a new pit in the area, at Bradley Fen near the old King’s Dyke workings in Whittlesey. Of course, since that opening there has been a queue of local and more widely based geologists and geological societies waiting to get in. Our turn came on August 17th, on a fine warm day.

The party in Bradley Fen Quarry, Whittlesey 17.8.03

  We had hoped to be led by local expert and Section member Alan Dawn, but the hospital decided that it was to be that week that Alan had his hip operation, so Stamford and District Geological Society Chairman Cliff Nicklin kindly stepped in at the eleventh hour.

   Whittlesey was very much in the news anyway following the discovery of substantial remains of a giant Leedsichthys fish in the nearby Star Pit (see Kay Hawkins’s article elsewhere on this website), a find so important that it was made the subject of one of the programmes in the recent ‘Big Monster Dig’ TV series on Channel 4. Thus it was that the 19 or so participants all trooped in to Bradley Fen determined to find a Leedsichthys of their own, or at least something exciting in the vertebrate line.

Overview of Bradley Fen Quarry

   One of the more attractive aspects of the new pit is that the workings have been extended down to Bed 10 of the Oxford Clay Formation, the source of large fossiliferous nodules and a multitude of other fossils. Sure enough we found more fossils than you could shake a stick at in that bed, but as always they were compressed and friable, so little use for keeping. Sadly, the ichthyosaurs, etc were mostly in hiding for our visit, although modesty doesn’t forbid me mentioning that I managed to find a very presentable vertebrae of a marine reptile complete with fused ribs. Helen Jones also turned up a nicely preserved rib, and some decent invertebrate fossils were also found, so everyone went home happy.

Andrew Swift