A HISTORY OF RUTLAND There are only four places within the limits of Rutland where such gravels occur. The first is a patch about half a mile in length on the slope of the hill near Stoke Dry south of Uppingham. The second is near Belton, where there are five small isolated patches of gravel lying on the Upper Lias, and as similar gravel underlies the Boulder-Clay of Barrow Hill to the north-west these gravels are believed to be part of the same set of beds — one of them indeed seems to pass beneath the glacial clay on which Lambley Lodge is situated. The third locality is south of Oakham on the Brook Mill ridge, where four small tracts of gravel and sand have been mapped as overlying the Boulder-Clay. The fourth locality is around Holywell in Lincolnshire, where there are several small patches of a peculiar gravel, some of them occur- ring in that county and some of them in Rutland. One of the latter is on the south side of Newell Wood and has been quarried for gravel, which is evenly stratified and consists almost entirely of waterworn pebbles of Lincolnshire Limestone with some from the harder beds in the Northampton Sands ; above the gravel there is an irregular bed of reddish-brown sand surmounted by a few feet of light-grey Boulder- Clay. All the other neighbouring patches of gravel are similarly com- posed of Limestone-pebbles without any admixture of chalk- or flint- pebbles, and some of them near Holywell Lodge are compacted by a calcareous cement into solid masses of conglomerate. Other examples of these Limestone gravels occur in Northampton- shire, and Professor Judd has suggested that they are really of pre- Glacial date and are remnants of the valley-gravels formed by the rivers which drained eastward off the Limestone hills before the country was invaded by the ice of the Glacial period. POST-GLACIAL DEPOSITS After the glacial conditions had passed away rivers began once more to course freely over the surface of the country, cutting new valleys out of the mantle of Glacial deposits and gradually eating their way through these into the Jurassic rocks beneath. In this manner the present drainage system of the country was produced, and some of the later stages in the process are indicated by tracts of gravel in the existent valleys above the flood-levels of the present streams. In Rutland however the tracts of such gravel are of small extent. The most considerable tract is that near Caldecott and Easton Mill in the valley of the Welland ; much of the material seems to have been brought down by the Eye brook, which is bordered by a gravel deposit all the way from Stockerston to Caldecott, and thence a strip of gravel borders the alluvium of the Welland as far as Thorpe Mill. The materials of this gravel have been furnished mainly by the erosion of the Glacial deposits through which the Eye brook has cut its way, and which still form a continuous tract of several square miles in extent around its sources on the high land near Tilton-on-the-Hill (Leicestershire). Small tracts of gravelly soil occur along the courses of the rivers 12
