Chapter 6.

Research Projects.

Members of the HGS have undertaken research from the very beginning and published papers in the Society’s journals. This has largely been individual research rather than by groups, apart from the original East Riding Boulder Committee from 1893 to 1909. The approaching centenary seemed like a good opportunity for members of the Society to collectively do some practical geology and create a lasting legacy.

[Note – detailed reports of the research projects, including fieldwork reports, published results and bibliographies, are available on the HGS Website]

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Centenary Chalk Project.

In 1984 the Committee accepted Felix Whitham’s proposal to log the stratigraphy of the Chalk in Yorkshire and create a new collection of Chalk fossils. Felix had already done some fieldwork and published some stratigraphic logs in Humberside Geologist. There had been an earlier project in 1970 to collect Chalk fossils for Hull Museums to replace the ones lost during the destruction of the Museum in Albion Street in World War II, but there are no detailed records of this project or whether it was successful.

Fieldwork began in the summer of 1984 and progressed rapidly with a core team of eleven members visiting the quarries and measuring the thickness of the beds of chalk, marl and flint (Whitham 1987). By matching the patterns of the bedding we were able to link up a complete sequence from the quarries. The Flamborough Formation was logged on the coastal cliffs. Following a suggestion from Professor Malcolm Hart of the University of Plymouth, Mike Horne registered as a postgraduate student at the University in order to enhance the project by using the facilities to study the microfossils and geochemistry of the marl bands. By 1987 there had been enough research done to produce a conference poster at the Earth Science Teachers Association conference in Cottingham. Conference posters of the complete stratigraphy (apart from some minor gaps) were ready for the Centenary meeting along with a display of specimens collected. Felix Whitham went on to write two papers based on the Project’s research which were published in the Proceedings of the Yorkshire Geological Society. When he presented a talk to a meeting of the YGS at the British Geological Survey in Keyworth the YGS President congratulated Felix for producing work of the type that professionals no longer have time to undertake.

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East Riding Boulder Committee.

Many geologists start their interest in the subject by picking up pebbles on beaches and the variety of pebbles to be seen on the beaches of Holderness continues to fascinate many. The East Riding Boulder Committee was revived as an informal ‘citizen science’ project. The name is a little misleading because it reuses the name used for the original research in the 1890s and 1900s yet it is not really a committee in any sense of the word and the recording is not restricted to ‘boulders’ (clasts over the size of 256mm) because it includes pebbles and small pebbles. Members have been encouraged to record the glacial erratics they find on the beaches and in the cliffs of East Yorkshire. There have been some Boulder Committee excursions to the coast and some quarries specifically for this purpose. Reports have been compiled and published in Humberside Geologist ever since. Mike Horne attempted to analyse the distribution pattern of the erratics that were recorded and presented the results at a joint meeting with the YGS in 2004 (Horne 2021).

Flamborough Quaternary Research Project.

During one of the fieldwork days for a Centre for Lifelong Learning course at South Landing, Flamborough, Ian Heppenstall asked Hull University tutor Mike Horne about the Quaternary sequence. Half way through his explanation Mike realised that it was very different from the well-known story of the buried cliff at Sewerby dated to the last interglacial, and he suggested that it would be worthy of further research. The Hull Geological Society agreed to support the project (and any future ones) as long as all members were invited to participate and that it did not incur any costs to the Society. Fieldwork began in June 2004 with the deposits being logged, photographed and sampled. The research was always hampered by the lack of complete exposures due to persistent vegetated slumped areas. For many subsequent years there were three annual visits to South Landing, Danes Dyke and Sewerby to see if there were any changes to the exposures; the bays to the north of Flamborough Head were also investigated. Although we could establish the sequence of the deposits, establishing dates for the events was beyond our capabilities and Professor Mark Bateman of Sheffield University helped us by using the Optically Stimulated Luminescence technique on some key samples to establish their age (Bateman et al. 2015). We never actually finished writing the report of this research, perhaps because we were hoping that those pesky grassy slumps would be washed away in a storm next year! Sadly most of the key contributors to the project have passed away in recent years: Derek Gobbett, Ian Heppenstall, Rod Towse and Stuart Jones. Two others are no longer able to participate in fieldwork: Paul Richards and Rodger Connell. However the fieldwork data and draft reports are now available on the Society website. Ian Heppenstall was awarded the Felix Whitham Memorial Medal for his contributions to the research team in 2015. 

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Bisat Research Project.

When the Centre for Lifelong Learning at Hull University closed in 2013 Graham Kings and some other alumni asked if there was a way of continuing their geological studies through a research project. Mike Horne suggested that recording the exposures of the boulder clay cliffs of the Holderness coast would be a good topic for a long-term research project. William Sawny Bisat FRS had recorded the exposures in the 1930s measuring the distances by dead reckoning and his diagrammatic cross sections were published posthumously (Catt & Madgett 1981). As there has been considerable erosion at an average rate of two metres per year a modern comparison would be interesting and might reveal significant differences. Because of the persistent erosion over a period of years clean exposures would become available, apart from areas where the coast is protected as the cliffs stabilise and become vegetated. Thus the Bisat Project was born and started with a number of meetings to discuss methods. One significant issue was whether to measure the exposures from the top down or bottom up: as the cliffs are slowly being eroded the exact height of the cliffs above Ordnance Datum is not known and height of the sandy beach can vary from day to day. Fieldwork began in March 2014 with a visit to Skipsea Whithow Mere. Subsequently a core group of researchers met fortnightly on weekdays when the tide was right. They decided to photograph the cliffs in the mornings so that they would always have similar light conditions. By September 2019, after over 50 field excursions, Graham Kings had taken over 1500 photographs of the exposures (Haughey 2020). Graham Kings was awarded the Felix Whitham Memorial Medal in 2021 for his contributions to the Bisat Project. Mark Bateman of Sheffield University helped the project by using Optically Stimulated Luminescence technology to obtain a date for a block of Basement Till the group collected from Eastington beach (Bateman et al. 2025). This indicates that the Basement Till dates to the last glaciation rather than an older one.

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Skipsea Withow Mere.

Members of the Society have visited and logged this coastal exposure of a freshwater lake deposits on a few occasions. The first time was as a fieldwork project for Mike Horne’s University of Hull geology adult education class. The site has been recorded on four occasions and the data published on the Society’s website. Stuart Jones made an auger with extensions so that we could bore down into the deep peat sediments in the centre of the exposure to log it. Stuart’s knowledge of different types of wood from his boat building days helped to identify the tree trunks and branches in the upper parts of the peat deposits (Marsters 2011). Visits to this site are doubly pleasurable due to its proximity to Mr Moo’s Ice Cream Parlour!

‘Rescue Geology’ Projects:

Archaeologists undertake short excavations which are called “rescue archaeology” when they have a quick opportunity to excavate and record a temporary site. The Hull Geological Society has on occasions been able to record the geology of ephemeral exposures that are being developed. Here are some examples of our “rescue geology” and others can be found on the Society’s website.

Hessle ‘Buried Cliff’.

The first such example that I remember was in May 1983 when Kenneth Fenton arranged to record the temporary exposure of ‘Buried Cliff’ at Hessle railway station before it was removed to make way for a new road. Ken logged and photographed it and returned a few more times to collect specimens (Fenton 1984). Unfortunately we did not measure the stratigraphy of the Chalk in the cliff.

The Market Weighton By-pass.

Lynden Emery heard about some rescue archaeology on the new road descending Arras Hill to the Market Weighton By-pass. Local archaeologists had visited the site looking for the ‘Roman Road’ marked on maps, but did not find it. Lynden arranged for members of the HGS to visit the site to record the geology in 1990. The stratigraphy was recorded and published in Humberside Geologist (Emery et al. 1995) and the fossil specimens collected were donated to Hull Museums so that they were in the public domain.

Rifle Butts SSSI foundations.

When the Hull Geological Society became involved in the conservation of this site near Goodmanham and particularly when we were designing the shelter (see Chapter 9) members decided that we needed to research the geology. The exposure was logged and this information was used for a visitors leaflet (Horne & Dutton 1992) and for the new information notice board. Any fossils found during the regular removal of any scree were donated to Hull Museums so that they were in the public domain. Any large pieces of rock were left under the hawthorn hedge as a future resource for geologists. When the foundations were dug for the shelter a dustbin-full of the material from the floor was retained; samples were offered to researchers at the time and the remainder was donated to Hull Museums as a resource for researchers in the future wishing to work on the Liasic rocks from the floor of the site without the need to excavate new pits and risk contaminating the site (Mitchell 1996). Fossils found on the “rescue geology” visit to the Market Weighton By-Pass helped us to date the Jurassic beds below the unconformity.

Sands Top Quarry at North Newbald.

This quarry in the Cave Oolite has been a favourite site for members of the HGS to visit in the past. Felix Whitham collected there for many years and published a faunal list (Whitham 1984) and Mike Horne studied the palaeoecology (Horne & Whitham 1988). When applications were made by the owners to change the use of the site or to fill it with waste the East Yorkshire RIGS Group made some representations to the planning authorities to try to conserve part of the site. Members of the Society visited the site on a couple of occasions in 2003 to record the stratigraphy and found that the top of the Cave Oolite was displaying karst-like solution features which were recorded and sampled.

The North Cave Wetlands.

Gravels are being extracted in the Vale of York in the North Cave area and the resulting pits flooded to various depths to form a wetland nature reserve that has been donated to the Yorkshire Wildlife Trust. The on-going extraction of gravels at Dryham Lane near North Cave has provided members of the HGS access to record the geology. Our first visit was in the winter of 2003 and there have been subsequent visits as the gravel extraction has progressed to the west. Our researches there found nothing that disagrees with the Geological Survey’s ‘Solid’ map but we did find some interesting specimens in the chalk gravels, such as a bored Poroshparea found by Rodger Connell.

Quarry at Knapton.

Derek Gobbett obtained permission for members of the Society to visit a former quarry on the northern edge of the Wolds that was being filled in order to record the stratigraphy and take samples. Paul Hildreth made a detailed record of the Black Band exposed there. Derek and Mike Horne recorded the rest of the Chalk stratigraphy and examined exposures of clay beneath the Chalk which we assumed to be Speeton Clay.

Basement Till exposures at Bridlington.

The Basement Till has fascinated members of the Society for a very long time and exposures at Bridlington and Sewerby are rare. G W Lamplugh had seen and recorded exposures in the 1880s and John Catt had seen some in the 1960s. Patrick Boylan had recorded an exposure near Bridlington sea walls in May 1964, and his diagram and samples are in the Lewis Penny Collection at the University of Hull. In 2018 Rodger Connell found a temporary exposure at Bridlington when the pebble beach had been washed away and members of the HGS visited the site to collect samples in February 2019. Fred Nixon of the Harker Geological Society also visited the site to record the exposed Basement Till that contained ‘rafts’ of Bridlington Crag and planned to publish the results in Humberside Geologist.

[note – I thank Rodger Connell and Graham Kings for providing extra information for this Chapter]

 References

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