We will take as our guide to the solution of this problem a very interesting pamphlet by the late Mr. Edwards, the engineer employed in cutting out the channel for our harbour in 1829, entitled “The River Waveney—did it ever reach the sea via Lowestoft?”
He thus commences his account of the physical history of the Waveney Valley—
“First and in order of date, what can be gleaned from Geological evidence? It is universally admitted that the last great change of the surface of the earth, by whatever cause brought about, left the surface of the uplands very much in the same form in which we now find them.” p. 6.
Mr. Edwards refrains from expressing any view as to the causes which brought about this last great change. He was probably not familiar with the explanation with which recent geological science has furnished us. If you refer to any of the more recent treatises on the geology of Great Britain, you will find somewhere in the later chapters an account of the subsidence and elevation of these islands during what is called the Glacial Period—movements due to what may be generally described as the settlement of the earth’s crust. { 3}
In no part of England is there more striking evidence of this movement than in the coast district of Norfolk and Suffolk. The old land surface which went down and was re-elevated nearly to its former level, is well known in these parts as the Forest Bed, which now forms the bottom of the sea at a short distance from the shore from Cromer to Kessingland. It appears as the lowest stratum of the cliff at Kessingland, and at other places on our coast. It is also disclosed in inland pits from which some of its most marvellous relics have been extracted. That the surface of this bed was once above water and covered with terrestrial vegetation, like that on which we now have our being, is proved by the stumps of trees which have been found fixed upright in it, as they were when alive and growing. A specimen of these old tree stumps is to be seen in the Norwich Museum. It is on this old land surface and more or less embedded in it, that the relics of an older world are buried, which so frequently make their appearance in the trawl nets of our fishermen,—the teeth and bones of Elephants, the Rhinoceros, Hippopotamus, and other animals, which now belong to the fauna of countries far away to the south. This old land surface has been covered with some hundred or more feet of sand, clay, and gravel deposited upon it during the process of subsidence, and which after the re-elevation of the Island formed the surface soil of a great part of Suffolk and Norfolk.