The water supply of Kent : with records of sinkings and borings / by William Whitaker ... with contributions by H. Franklin Parsons ... Hugh Robert Mill ... and J.C. Thresh ... Pub. by order of the lords commissioners of His Majesty's Treasury.

  • Whitaker, William, 1836-1925.
Date:
1908
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: The water supply of Kent : with records of sinkings and borings / by William Whitaker ... with contributions by H. Franklin Parsons ... Hugh Robert Mill ... and J.C. Thresh ... Pub. by order of the lords commissioners of His Majesty's Treasury. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    18/414 (page 8)
    KENT WATER SUPPLY. GEOLOGIC FORMATIONS. Kent rejoices in varied scenery, and therefore also in a considerable number of geologic formations. No less than 27 divisions are marked on the maps, and were it not that the re-survey has but just entered the north-western corner of the county there would be more, as the Chalk would be divided into Upper, Middle, and Lower. Kent is chiefly a Cretaceous county, that great Series being well developed, and some of its divisions having been named after Kentish places; Tunbridge Wells being used for divi- sions of the Hastings Beds; Folkestone, Sandgate and Hythe for divisions of the Lower Greensand, one of which already had the local name of Kentish Rag. The name Cantian has, indeed, been proposed for the whole formation. There is also a considerable tract of the older Tertiary beds, and the lowest member, the Lower London Tertiaries, is best developed in Kent, so that its three divisions all have Kentish names, from Thanet, Woolwich, Oldhaven or Blackheath. Of the Pliocene there are some small tracts of sand, far away from the mass of the Series, many miles on the other side of the Thames. The Pleistocene beds cover a large area on the whole, rest- ing irregularly on various divisions of the Tertiary and Creta- ceous Series; but though wide-spread they are thin, whilst the older beds are thick, and especially the Cretaceous. Amongst these there are no representatives of the Glacial Series, so far as we know, though some of the Hill Gravel may turn out to be as old as some of the Glacial Drift of other parts. The following tables show the order of succession, and the classification of the various stratigraphic divisions found in the county, the detailed column on the right giving the names of those divisions which are shown on the Geological Survey Maps, down to the base of the Ashdown Sand, the lowest outcropping division in the county, from which there is an unbroken succession upward to the Bagshot Sand, whilst deep borings show what seem to be a fairly continuous Series underground down to the Trias.