Welsh Journals

opened on a land cliff facing a desert waste to the south, an environ- ment in fact not very different from the cave cliffs associated with the finding of the Dead Sea Scrolls. In fact the flatter wastes to the south may even have been covered with sheets of stagnant saline water. Red Chamber was a similar feature to Bacon Hole. A search for lead was once made here, and traces of red ochre, once extracted for commercial purposes, can still be discerned (see Gower Caves by Allen and Rutter). Our last clue (but the most convincing one) is to be found at Port Eynon. A narrow road runs about 50 yards behind the church and leads towards the Police Station. Soon after this minor roadway leaves the main road descending into the village, there are bluffs of very rubbly rock on the steeper flank of this lane. They obviously form the rock making the sharp rise just behind the church. Have a look at these rocks because they are extremely interesting, only please be careful because there is private property nearby and it would be as well to ask for "permission to view". The rock is a rough conglomerate, that is, a rock made up of boulders or large pebbles cemented in a matrix of finer material. The boulders here are mainly of limestone, derived from the Carboni- ferous Limestone, though some are of black and grey chert, possibly from the local patch of Millstone Grit at Port Eynon. The matrix is red or pink and either of sandy marl or of clay. The boulders are large, generally about a foot across (though a few are up to three feet across) and on the whole are well-rounded. They give the impression of having been carried by fast-flowing torrents of water and this is borne out by the stratified character of the rocks seen in the bluff beyond a garage. Here there are two thick sheets, practically hori- zontal, of coarse boulder-conglomerate, separated by thin finer- grained sandy and rubbly material. A fossil "stream-channel" is just about visible in one of the coarse sheets. The channel appears to be pointing southwards, and many of the boulders have their longer axes sloping the same way. There is just a hint of material being carried swiftly southwards in this Port Eynon area. Now this patch of conglomerates at Port Eynon is almost certainly of Triassic age, and has been claimed to be of this age since the beginning of this century. On the Geological Survey maps of 1907, the area of these Triassic rocks at Port Eynon is shown to extend for almost half a mile. Exposures were seen then that are no longer visible, on the road sides, for example. An old pit, 200 yards north of the church, even showed horizontal Triassic conglomerate resting on upturned Millstone Grit shales. This again proves the great extent of the pre-Triassic erosion in southern Gower. These shales occur in a small downfold or syncline at Port Eynon, and these softer shales had already been largely hollowed out by Triassic erosion before these conglomerates were laid in the resulting hollow at Port Eynon. Port Eynon is a great hollow or "wadi" of Triassic times. Torrential rain water rushed down this hollow, choking it