Abstract: Interbedded shale and limestone successions in the Kilve Beach area, Bristol Channel Basin, UK, provide insights on fracture networks around normal faults in fine-grained lithologies. Fracture sets with distinct orientations are characteristic of both shale and limestone beds. Shear fractures (mode II) predominate in the shaly units, and they have typically more gentle dips and a larger spread in orientations than extension veins and shear fractures in the limestones. Fracture intensities decrease away from the fault core, but maximum intensities, total number of fractures and widths of the damage zones appear to be independent of throw for normal faults with offsets of less than 20 m. Thus, there is no clear systematic relationship between fault throw and damage zone width in the shales studied by us. However, an asymmetry in the fracture distribution is evidenced by a wider hanging-wall damage zone and differences in fracture orientations in some cases. We interpret the asymmetry and spread in fracture orientations to be the result of propagating fault-tip process zones and the tempo-spatial impact of fault-slip events.

Abstract In the summer of 1794 William George Maton, together with his friends Charles Hatchett and Thomas Rackett, embarked on a tour into Cornwall visiting the more southerly parts of Dorset and Devon en route . Rackett and Maton completed a second tour two years later, covering the rest of Dorset and Devon together with Somerset. An account of the tours was subsequently published by Maton, providing a contemporary description of SW England during the latter part of the eighteenth century. This was perhaps the first description of the region by scientifically aware travellers. They explored valleys, descended mines, visited smelters and collected minerals and must be regarded as among the earliest geotourists. Many sites which they visited, such as Roche Rock in Cornwall, Kent’s Cavern in Devon and Wookey Hole in Somerset, became major attractions for geoscientists in the following centuries. Discussions in the text suggest that the travellers looked at the rocks with neptunist eyes. Maton summarized the geological and mineralogical references on a map which used shading with lines rather than colour to differentiate individual strata. Although rudimentary and inaccurate, the map is of considerable historic importance.

In Britain, the majority of Lower and Middle Paleolithic archaeological finds come from river terrace deposits. The impressive “staircase” terrace sequences of southeast England, and research facilitated by aggregate extraction have provided a considerable body of knowledge about the terrace chronology and associated archaeology in that area. Such research has been essential in considering rates of uplift, climatic cycles, archaeological chronologies, and the landscapes in which hominins lived. It has also promoted the view that southeast England was a major hominin route into Britain. By contrast, the terrace deposits of the southwest have been little studied. The Palaeolithic Rivers of South West Britain (PRoSWEB) project employed a range of geoarchaeological methodologies to address similar questions at different scales, focusing on the rivers Exe, Axe, Otter, and the paleo-Doniford, all of which were located south of the maximum Pleistocene glacial limit (marine oxygen isotope stage [MIS] 4–2). Preliminary analysis of the fieldwork results suggests that although the evolution of these catchments is complex, most conform to a standard staircase-type model, with the exception of the Axe, and, to a lesser extent, the paleo-Doniford, which are anomalous. Although the terrace deposits are less extensive than in southeast Britain, differentiation between terraces does exist, and new dates show that some of these terraces are of great antiquity (MIS 10+). The project also reexamined the distribution of artifacts in the region and confirms the distributional bias to the river valleys, and particularly the rivers draining southward to the paleo–Channel River system. This distribution is consistent with a model of periodic occupation of the British peninsula along and up the major river valleys from the paleo–Channel River corridor. These data have a direct impact on our understanding of the paleolandscapes of the southwest region, and therefore our interpretations of the Paleolithic occupation of the edge of the continental landmass.