Stick No 7 on its first outing with Don, stuck into very recent soil near Southwold, Suffolk on a cliff edge that probably will have already collapsed into the sea by the time that this image is posted, as the cliff edge is receding by several meters each year. A truly “here today, gone tomorrow” sort of place.

Stick doing an interesting walk near Covehythe, Suffolk, as the beach is not just a beach now, but was also a beach some 1.8 million years ago when the beach and cliff sands were deposited. Now that beach is eroding, so there is a cliff, but then I would have had a view inland, either of ice or of tundra, with mammoths perhaps. You can tell it was an ice age then, from the occasional bands of shells in the cliffs, which are from species arrive today, but with very northerly distributions. And you can tell it was a beach because you can see lines in the cliffs where waves have piled up lines of sand on what would have been a tidal sandy shore. On a cold winter’s day you can get a bit of a feel for what it would have been like then doing the same walk.

Attached is a photo of stick 7 on a walk looking for exposures of the Reading beds in local stream-beds last weekend on the western edge of London

Stick 7 is standing upright in 50 million year old freshwater gravels which were deposited by a tropical river, as the climate would have been much hotter in the days before the ice ages set in some 30 million years ago. This is evident because in places you can find lenses of plant fossils including leaves, and seeds, as proof of life at that time. I like the concept of ancient river deposits of gravel, being turned into new stream deposits of the same gravel. It has a nice sense of continuity in the “dust to dust” tradition

Stick 7 is standing up precariously in what were clays laid down in a river delta in South Wales, but as the clays are now a bit over 300 million years old, they have had the water squeezed out of them and they have hardened into mudrock. But in places, you can still find bits of the plants that were living there at the time which indicate a hot marshy rainforest environment. It was the time of the first reptiles and giant dragonflies flitted around, but the most that I have found here is the odd cockroach wing. The plants were very different from those that exist now, as this was before all conifers and flowering plants, but tall trees of sorts had already evolved so it would still have been a forest, and walking would have been difficult because of the swamps and vegetation.