Beer Head Fossil Hunting

1900 – A detailed Upper Greensand record at Little Beach
Jukes-Browne and Hill published measured sections of the upper Foxmould and the overlying chert-bearing and chert-free sands beside Beer Head. Their individual beds, shell records and observations of rapid lateral change preserve a valuable baseline for a coastline where exposures have changed substantially.

1903 – Rowe maps the Chalk markers at Beer Head
Arthur Rowe’s annotated plate IX traced the first flint line, the two-foot and four-foot bands and higher marl and flint markers across the headland. His fossil collecting from the northern cleft linked these features to the traditional Chalk zones. Modern accounts still use the photograph to correlate the separated exposures.

1903–1904 – Bed-by-bed fossil records enter the Geological Survey memoirs
The Survey documented the coarse sponge-bearing limestone, the honeycombed Holaster subglobosus bed, and a gully section of lower white Chalk with small echinoids and cidarid spines. It also recorded microscopic fossils in washed Beer Head chalk and heart-urchins from the higher cleft. These observations help distinguish genuine headland records from the richer lists for neighbouring Hooken.

1951 – A crab from the historical Beer Head collections is named
Thomas Henry Withers described Rathbunopon woodsi from a small carapace in the Meyer collection at the Sedgwick Museum, Cambridge, specimen B50779. The original provenance is Beer Head, Cenomanian, upper varians zone, Meyer’s Bed 12. This is the naming date, not a known discovery date. The Survey identifies Meyer’s “Beer Head” section and Bed 12 with Hooken Cliff, so this is probably a record from the wider Hooken area, not a verified specimen from the precise modern headland.

1952–1989 – The coast receives formal scientific protection
The Sidmouth to Beer Coast was first notified as a Site of Special Scientific Interest in 1952. It was notified under the Wildlife and Countryside Act in 1985, with a further boundary revision in 1989. The designation recognises the exceptional Upper Greensand and Chalk exposures together with the coast’s important grassland and invertebrate habitats.

1984 – Modern local logs and a revised limestone framework
Bruce Tocher documented the Beer Head cliff-foot and high-bluff sections separately, including the hardgrounds and the very condensed Pinnacles interval. His palynological samples also showed the limitations of the site: the sampled Upper Greensand and limestone were barren of dinoflagellate cysts, while the higher Chalk assemblages were poor. In the same period, Jarvis and Woodroof introduced the Beer Head Limestone name and its historical subdivisions, forming the basis of later revisions.

2001 – The headland is reassessed in the Geological Conservation Review
The GCR account placed the Beer Head sections in a modern Chalk formation framework and compared Rowe’s markers with newly annotated photographs. It also recognised lower Seaford Chalk preserved within the high-level solution-collapse feature above the headland, extending the local record beyond the older nodular chalk cliffs.

2004 – Upper Greensand boundaries are tested against the local sections
Richard Gallois’s coastal study used separate Little Beach and Beer Head Arch logs to demonstrate the abrupt lateral change in chert and sandstone beds. The work helped establish that the top of the chert cannot reliably define the member boundary, and set the local sections within the Foxmould, Whitecliff Chert and Bindon Sandstone framework.

2005 – Dissolution explains the surviving high-level Chalk masses
Gallois analysed the partially dissolved chalk at Beer Head and nearby cliffs. He showed how large, coherent masses of younger chalk could subside within a decalcified layer rather than represent an ordinary continuous succession. The interpretation explains both the preservation of unusually young chalk and an important source of instability in these cliffs.

2009 – Beer Head brachiopods contribute to a taxonomic revision
A comparative study of Gyrosoria documented a Beer Head sample in the National Museum in Prague, containing a complete shell, isolated valves and articulated shells in shell-rich matrix. This provides a specimen-based locality record for Gyrosoria lata, long familiar to Chalk geologists under the name Terebratulina lata; the old sample label does not identify a precise modern bed.

2011 – The Beer Head crab holotype is refigured
A revision of the Cretaceous crab genus Rathbunopon illustrated the R. woodsi holotype again and compared it with related European and North American species. The work retained the historical Beer Head Cenomanian limestone label. The earlier Meyer collection context points to the wider Hooken area; the revision did not establish a newly located bed at the modern headland.

Scope and terminology
This account follows the headland, its western foot at Little Beach, and the high-level bluffs and solution-collapse masses at Beer Head. These are different exposures, not one continuously accessible measured section. The much thicker Beer Stone adit succession and the main Hooken landslip farther west are not used as substitute logs. Beds are described from older to younger. The historical Pounds Pool, Hooken and Little Beach subdivisions remain useful for identifying rock packages, but the current BGS Lexicon does not retain them as formal members of the Beer Head Limestone Formation. Historical thicknesses below apply to the stated station and need not describe today’s changing exposures.

SELBORNE GROUP

Upper Greensand Formation

Upper Greensand: late Albian marine sands
The Upper Greensand below the Chalk consists of glauconitic sandstone, shell-rich calcarenite and beds of chert. It represents shallow-marine deposition, with currents concentrating shell debris and repeatedly exposing or eroding cemented sea floors. The apparent position of the highest chert changes abruptly around Beer Head, so the last visible chert is not a reliable formation or member boundary. The modern subdivision is Foxmould, Whitecliff Chert and Bindon Sandstone. A full lower Foxmould section or its basal contact is not continuously exposed at the headland.

Foxmould Member

Upper Foxmould at the western end of Little Beach
The upper part includes glauconitic sands and cemented, shell-rich layers. Gallois recorded siliceously cemented beds in the upper Foxmould below Beer Head at SY224879, the easternmost such occurrence in his coastal survey. The historical section at the western end of Little Beach exposes only its upper beds; observations of deeper sands below the Pinnacles belong to the separate Hooken locality.

Historical upper Foxmould: concretionary yellowish-green sand (at least 8 ft seen)
The lowest exposed package was yellowish-green glauconitic sand containing large lens-shaped calcareous sandstone concretions with dark-grey centres, abundant broken shells and iron pyrites. The 8 ft (about 2.4 m) is an exposed thickness, not the full member.

Historical upper Foxmould: bright-green sand (½ ft)
A thin bright-green glauconitic sand, measured as ½ ft (about 0.15 m), separated the concretionary sands from the overlying shelly rock. No distinct fossil list was assigned to this thin bed.

Historical upper Foxmould: shelly glauconitic rock (1–2 ft)
This hard calcareous bed, about 0.3–0.6 m thick, was crowded with shells. The original identifications include Pecten (Neithea) quadricostatus, Exogyra conica and Ostrea vesiculosa. These are retained as historical records rather than silently revised species determinations.

Historical upper Foxmould: brown sandstone and yellow sand (1½ ft)
The top package was 1½ ft (about 0.46 m) of brownish sandstone passing down into yellow sand. It lay immediately below the bright-green, pebbly basal interval of the old “Chert Beds”. No separate fauna was recorded for this bed.

Whitecliff Chert Member

Culverhole hardgrounds and basal glauconitic package
The lower boundary is an eroded, cemented and intensely burrowed surface overlain by pebbly, glauconite-rich sandstone. A second hardground may cap that basal sandstone. Gallois identified this boundary in the accessible historical sections below Beer Head; its green, recessed weathering band is more useful for correlation than the distribution of chert alone. These are sedimentary breaks, not separate thick formations.

Chert-bearing calcarenites and lateral change
The member consists mainly of sandy calcarenite, much of it comminuted shell material, with nodular and tabular chert and repeated cemented surfaces. Brown chert can retain shell fragments, burrows and bedding. At Little Beach the higher part becomes chert-free; the old section records more than 35 ft of sandstone without chert below the Chalk, although chert persists lower down. This is a lateral facies change, not proof that the Whitecliff Chert Member has disappeared.

Bindon Sandstone Member

Whitecliff Hardground and Bindon Bed 1
The Bindon Sandstone starts at the Whitecliff Hardground, a burrowed and eroded cemented surface. Its overlying pebbly glauconitic sandstone is the traditional “Coarse Band”, or Bed 1 in Gallois’s four-bed scheme. Both the Little Beach and Beer Head Arch columns in his measured correlation figure retain this basal package. Shell debris and reworked sediment clasts characterise the bed; the published figure does not provide a separate exact-headland species list.

Bindon Bed 2: chert-bearing eastern development
Bed 2 is calcareous sandstone and calcarenite. Gallois’s Beer Head Arch column shows chert in this interval, whereas his Little Beach column immediately to the west is chert-free. The change occurs across only tens of metres around the headland. Regional values of up to six chert horizons and individual cherts 0.6 m thick are not measurements of this particular Beer Head exposure.

Bindon Bed 3: wavy and cross-bedded sandstone
This chert-free calcareous sandstone/calcarenite lies above Bed 2 in both headland columns. Wavy bedding and low-angle trough cross-bedding are picked out by glauconitic seams. The unit thickens westwards into the Little Beach column as the underlying Bed 2 thins. Channelled erosion is demonstrated at nearby Pounds Pool, but that separate station is not presented as a channel measured at Beer Head itself.

Bindon Bed 4: upper cross-bedded and disturbed sands
The uppermost Bindon package shows festoon-type trough cross-bedding and locally disturbed bedding interpreted as slumping or dewatering. Gallois’s Little Beach and Beer Head Arch logs both depict the disturbed upper unit. The shells that make up the sandy calcarenite are useful evidence of current reworking; the famous ammonite-bearing concretions from Shapwick Quarry are not a Beer Head fossil record.

Lower nodular Upper Greensand hardground: Tocher sample Beer H6
Tocher’s measured headland section includes two nodular hardgrounds below the terminal Small Cove surface. The lower is shown at the Beer H6 sampling level within quartz-rich coarse calcarenite. It is retained as a distinct logged cemented interval, without inventing a modern bed number or a fossil list. The sample yielded no dinoflagellate cysts.

Intervening calcarenite: Tocher sample Beer H5
Coarse quartz-rich, glauconitic calcarenite separates the lower and upper nodular hardground intervals in the local log. Beer H5 marks a sample within this less strongly cemented interval. It yielded no dinoflagellate cysts; the negative result concerns this sample, not every fossil group in the rock.

Upper nodular Upper Greensand hardground: Tocher sample Beer H4
A second nodular cemented interval is shown at Beer H4. Above it the measured column returns to sandy calcarenite before the thick, blocky Small Cove hardground package. Neither these two nodular levels nor the H4/H5/H6 sample identifiers are new formal stratigraphic units; all three samples yielded no dinoflagellate cysts.

Small Cove Hardground
The top of the Upper Greensand at SY227879 is strongly cemented, cross-bedded calcarenite. Tocher described a 1–1.5 m hardground-bearing package penetrated by Thalassinoides burrows, which isolate irregular masses 5–30 cm across; burrowing and early fracturing give it a blocky appearance. Its upper surface is the disconformable base of the Chalk Group. This measurement describes the indurated upper Greensand package, not a 1–1.5 m sedimentary gap.

Historical Little Beach Upper Greensand log
The following twelve packages preserve the complete 64½ ft (about 19.7 m) section published in 1900 for Little Beach. They run upwards from the brownish sandstone just described in the upper Foxmould. The original “Chert Beds” grouping predates the modern Whitecliff Chert/Bindon boundary; the individual beds are retained without forcing an unsupported one-to-one match to the modern four-bed Bindon scheme. The old measurements are a separate historical station log, not additional beds placed above the Small Cove Hardground.

Basal green glauconitic sand (5 ft)
Green glauconitic sand contains hollow calcareous concretions and a rough pebbly layer at its base. The bryozoan Radiopora ornata was recorded from this package. It is 5 ft (about 1.52 m) thick.

Dark-grey argillaceous sand (1 ft)
A 1 ft (about 0.30 m) clay-rich grey sand overlies the basal glauconitic package. The old description assigns no separate fossil assemblage to it.

Buff sand with black cherts (13 ft)
The next 13 ft (about 3.96 m) consists of buff-coloured sand with black chert and some calcareous concretions. This is the thickest single package in the historical Little Beach log.

Grey calcareous stone and oyster-rich grit (4 ft)
A hard grey calcareous stone and shelly grit, 4 ft (about 1.22 m) thick, is crowded with oysters recorded as Exogyra. No species determination is attached to this particular bed.

Sandstone with rusty-grey cherts (6 ft)
Sandstone with layers of grey, iron-stained chert forms the overlying 6 ft (about 1.83 m). It is distinct from the black-chert-bearing sand lower in the log.

Yellow calcareous sandstone with green-grey seams (5½ ft)
This 5½ ft (about 1.68 m) package contains irregular seams of greenish-grey sand within yellowish calcareous sandstone. A separate fossil list was not recorded.

Waterworn sandstone-pebble bed (2 ft)
A 2 ft (about 0.61 m) bed of rounded sandstone pebbles marks erosion and reworking of already consolidated sediment. The pebbles should not be confused with fossil shells.

Massive greenish sandstone with pebbles and shells (8 ft)
The overlying 8 ft (about 2.44 m) is massive greenish sandstone, including a layer of sandstone pebbles and broken shells. The source does not identify these shells more precisely.

Compact yellow sandstone with greensand seams (6 ft)
Compact yellowish sandstone streaked with greensand seams occupies the next 6 ft (about 1.83 m). It is a separate package below the rough calcareous grit.

Hard lumpy calcareous grit (3 ft)
A hard, rough and unevenly cemented calcareous grit is 3 ft (about 0.91 m) thick. The historical table gives no named fauna for it.

Coarse yellow-green sand (1 ft)
A 1 ft (about 0.30 m) coarse yellowish-green sand lies beneath the uppermost bedded sandstone. The old authors traced this distinctive sandy band around the headland, but its colour alone does not establish a fossil horizon.

Upper yellow bedded sandstone (10 ft)
The topmost 10 ft (about 3.05 m) consists of yellowish, glauconitic, bedded sandstone, with thin wavy greenish seams in its lower part. It is overlain by the Cenomanian limestone succession. The published log records no separate species assemblage from this package.

CHALK GROUP

GREY CHALK SUBGROUP

Beer Head Limestone Formation

Condensed Cenomanian limestone at the headland
At the reference section at SY227879 the formation is about 5 m thick, contrasting with roughly 10 m at the Hooken adit farther west. Sandy, shell-rich limestones contain mineralised and burrowed surfaces recording long interruptions in deposition. Fossils can be contemporary with the sediment or reworked from older beds; a green or brown coating and abrasion can therefore be stratigraphically important. The full faunas used to zone these units were collected at several Devon stations, and cannot all be claimed as finds at Beer Head.

Pounds Pool interval: basal coarse sandstone
The lower metre is yellow-brown, very coarse calcareous sandstone with about 50% rounded quartz grains, together with minor tourmaline and feldspar. Blocks ripped from the underlying Upper Greensand hardground occur at the base. Decalcification commonly makes this part weather back into a notch. The conspicuous branching sponge Acanthochaetetes ramulosus, historically called Ceriopora or Ceriocava ramulosa, is common. The Survey also described large quartz grains and vein-quartz and hornstone pebbles in the basal 3–4 ft of its older Bed A, with sponge branches bored by the bivalve historically identified as Lithodomus. Its associated lower Bed A records include valves named Terebratella pectita and Rhynchonella dimidiata; these are historical identifications, not modern specimen revisions.

Pounds Pool interval: upper sandy bioclastic limestone
Above the coarse basal metre is pale-brown sandy limestone containing about 35% quartz and 30% skeletal debris. Tocher measured the whole Pounds Pool package at about 3.5 m; large bivalve fragments, commonly 1–5 cm, become more conspicuous upwards and the rock becomes shellier and weakly nodular. Acanthochaetetes ramulosus remains common.

Weston Hardground
The top of the Pounds Pool interval is a hummocky, weakly glauconitised and iron-stained surface or a more clearly mineralised local hardground. A slight parting and penetrating Thalassinoides burrows mark its position. It separates historical Beds A1 and A2; it is not an extra thickness of limestone added to either bed.

Hooken interval (historical Bed A2; about 0.9 m)
This is grey, rubbly, shell-detrital nodular limestone, much thinner here than at the adit. Many nodules have been reworked, weakly green-coated or iron-stained, and composite nodules may comprise several cemented fragments. The described lithology contains about 30% skeletal debris and conspicuous large silicified shell fragments. The historical combined Bed A, which includes both this and the Pounds Pool interval, yielded the ornate bivalve recorded as Pecten asper, echinoids recorded as Holaster altus and H. laevis, and an ammonite recorded as Ammonites mantelli. Those older records are not resolved here to a single modern sub-bed.

King’s Hole Hardground
The Hooken interval ends in a closely spaced set of phosphatised surfaces. The uppermost is the most strongly mineralised and nearly planar. It records a major interruption before deposition of historical Bed B; regional reworked ammonite assemblages above it are useful for correlation but are not a verified complete Beer Head species list.

Little Beach interval: cavernous hardground and white nodules
Immediately above King’s Hole is a heavily mineralised, highly convoluted, cavernous hardground. At the Beer Head station it is overlain by a bed of white nodules about 2–5 cm across in a sandy, glauconitic, light-grey matrix. The name Little Beach is a historical package name here; the 1.75 m thickness quoted for the adit must not be applied to this headland section.

Little Beach interval: burrowed biomicrite (historical Bed B)
Light-grey limestone made of fine carbonate mud, calcispheres and about 30% skeletal debris overlies the basal nodule bed. Large Thalassinoides burrows contain darker, more friable quartzose and glauconitic sediment piped down from the next interval, producing the familiar honeycombed weathering. In the Survey’s section about 50 yards west of the headland, Bed B was 2 ft 6 in (about 0.76 m) thick and contained common Holaster subglobosus and brachiopods recorded as Terebratula arcuata. This is a measured historical station, not an imposed thickness for every exposure.

Historical crab type from the Beer Head area
Rathbunopon woodsi was named by Withers in 1951 from a small crab carapace in the Meyer collection, now in the Sedgwick Museum, Cambridge, specimen B50779. The original label gives Cenomanian, upper varians zone, Meyer’s Bed 12, Beer Head. The 2011 revision refigured the holotype and retained its Beer Head limestone provenance. The Survey explicitly identifies Meyer’s “Beer Head” section and his Bed 12 with Hooken Cliff, so this old collection probably belongs to the wider Hooken area rather than the precise modern headland; this specimen is not assigned to the SY227879 log or advertised as a common find.

Historical section 50 yards west of the headland: four packages
The Survey’s 1903 table records a separate section reached above a pile of fallen blocks about 50 yards west of Beer Head. Its four packages follow below, from older to younger. These measured values preserve that historical station and are not added to Tocher’s later log or forced onto all modern formation boundaries.

Underlying finer calcareous sandstone (10 ft)
The lowest recorded package is 10 ft (about 3.05 m) of calcareous sandstone, finer-grained than the coarse Cenomanian grit above. It has a well-marked upper surface and few fossils. It belongs to the Upper Greensand, despite appearing here within the separately preserved historical station log.

Historical Bed A (11 ft to 12 ft 9 in)
Hard whitish gritty limestone has green-coated nodules at its top, a compact shelly upper part and a coarse-grained sponge-rich lower part. The original table names Pecten asper, Holaster altus, Ammonites mantelli and Ceriocava ramulosa. Its full measured range is approximately 3.35–3.89 m, covering the combined historical A package rather than a single currently formal member.

Historical Bed B (2 ft 6 in)
This hard quartzose, glauconitic limestone contains green-coated nodules at the top and two nodule layers near its base. Its pitted or honeycombed weathering is conspicuous, and the table records Holaster subglobosus and other fossils. The local measurement is about 0.76 m.

Historical basal Turonian limestone (2 ft 9 in)
Hard yellowish, gritty, glauconitic limestone caps this particular table, with a thickness of about 0.84 m. This is the Survey’s basal-Turonian package at this station, not the 1 ft 9 in basal bed of the separately recorded western gully, and not the 0.2 m Pinnacles interval measured by Tocher. No separate fauna is assigned to this table entry.

Bed A thinning above Little Beach (about 5 ft)
Tracing the beds westward above Little Beach, the Survey observed the lower coarse part of Bed A thinning out, leaving the whole A package only about 5 ft (1.52 m) thick. This is a lateral observation away from the thicker measured headland station, rather than an alternative total to average with it.

Bed B above Little Beach (about 2 ft)
Above the thinned A package, Bed B maintained a thickness of about 2 ft (0.61 m). The approximately 7 ft combined A–B succession was then traced towards the grass-covered Hooken undercliff. No new species list accompanies this particular lateral measurement.

Western fallen blocks: greenish Bed B limestone (2 ft)
More westerly fallen blocks showed a 2 ft greenish limestone package, with green-stained spaces between nodular lumps and a marked top layer of green-coated nodules. This describes the varying glauconite-rich facies of the upper bed in fallen material, not an additional in-situ layer above the headland succession.

Tocher’s separate limestone sample levels
The exact headland log locates Beer H11 in the lower Pounds Pool interval and H10 higher in that package; H9, H8 and H7 mark the Hooken, Little Beach and Pinnacles intervals respectively. These are sample identifiers, not bed numbers. The Upper Greensand and limestone samples yielded no dinoflagellate cysts, so absence of a cyst list must not conceal their documented stratigraphic positions.

Humble Point Hardground
The mineralised top of the Little Beach interval marks the upper boundary of the Beer Head Limestone in current BGS usage. Burrows penetrating downward contain sediment from the overlying condensed Pinnacles interval. Towards Beer Head, erosion surfaces separate farther west converge upon this boundary, so several episodes of omission and mineralisation may be compressed into a very small vertical interval.

WHITE CHALK SUBGROUP

Holywell Nodular Chalk Formation

Pinnacles interval (historical Bed C) and Haven Cliff Hardground
The locally named Pinnacles interval belongs at the base of the White Chalk Subgroup, within the Holywell Nodular Chalk framework, rather than at the top of the current Beer Head Limestone. At Beer Head it is reduced to a strongly cemented composite hardground, measured by Tocher as about 0.2 m; the GCR describes it as represented essentially by the terminal Haven Cliff Hardground. The thick glauconitic sand, white nodules and limonitic hardground succession of the 2.3 m adit section is absent as a comparable stack here. The upper surface marks the transition to the overlying Lower Turonian nodular chalk in the traditional local interpretation. Regional Neocardioceras-zone fossils explain the “Neocardioceras Hardground” name, but are not a list of ammonites independently recorded from this exact headland surface.

Lower Turonian nodular chalk
Above the basal condensed interval are hard, shell-rich nodular chalks. The Beer Stone freestone lens develops farther west towards the adit: the historical headland section explicitly lacks a recognisable freestone bed. Here the West Ebb Marl and Branscombe Hardground allow this attenuated succession to be compared with thicker sections elsewhere without importing their thicknesses or fauna.

Historical headland gully section: five successive packages
The Survey measured 15 ft 3 in (about 4.65 m) in a gully just west of Beer Head and included the five packages below in its Rhynchonella cuvieri Zone. The original zonal top and basal lithological divisions do not exactly define modern formation boundaries; the historical log is retained as observed, rather than forced into a newly numbered modern scheme.

Basal quartzose and glauconitic limestone (1 ft 9 in)
The lowest package is hard yellowish limestone rich in quartz and glauconite, with a distinct upper surface. Glauconitic sand occupies hollows between it and the bed below. Its measured thickness is about 0.53 m; a separate species list was not given.

Lower hard nodular chalk (5 ft)
Hard nodular chalk containing scattered glauconite grains forms the next 5 ft (about 1.52 m). The rock is already strongly cemented, and the original observer could not identify a Beer Stone freestone layer here.

Rough nodular shelly chalk (6 ft 6 in)
This 6 ft 6 in (about 1.98 m) package yielded small echinoids recorded as Cardiaster pygmaeus and Discoidea dixoni, together with Cidaris spines. These are exact-headland historical records; the broader Hooken echinoid assemblage should not be substituted for them.

Upper hard yellow limestone (6 in)
A 6 in (about 0.15 m) band of solid yellow limestone was welded onto the underlying nodular chalk, with a marked surface above it. The modern section identifies the prominent Branscombe Hardground near this top-of-nodular-chalk position, but the old measurement is not treated as the thickness of a modern named hardground.

Soft flintless chalk (1 ft 6 in)
The final 1 ft 6 in (about 0.46 m) is soft chalk without flints, below white chalk containing layers of black flints. The Survey included it in the lower zone; the exact modern boundary must be established from the marker surfaces rather than that historical zonal choice.

Basal Holywell: pale stacked-hardground package
Immediately above the thin Haven Cliff surface, the Beer Head photograph identifies a pale package of closely stacked basal Turonian hardgrounds. It records repeated cementation and interruption of sedimentation. No precise package thickness or separate exact-station fauna is provided by the photograph, so none is supplied here.

Holywell dispersed-nodule package
Higher in the same photographed section, closely stacked hardgrounds give way to dispersed nodules in a softer chalk matrix. The Beer Stone lens enters this horizon farther west, but the headland photograph does not show a local freestone lens. The transition is a separately labelled lithological change below the West Ebb Marl, not the marl itself.

West Ebb Marl
A marly interval within the lower nodular chalk is explicitly marked at Beer Head in the GCR photographs and Tocher’s local log. It lies above the separately visible transition from closely stacked hardgrounds to dispersed nodules. It is a local correlation marker, not evidence that the thick Beer Stone lens or the Filograna avita event observed at separate West Ebb must occur at this section.

Branscombe Hardground
A prominent iron-stained, strongly indurated surface caps the local Holywell nodular chalk. Condensation and erosion have removed much of the higher Holywell succession found east of Beer. It is followed by smoother, flint-bearing chalk. Several sedimentary omissions merge at this surface towards Hooken, so its visible thickness is not a measure of the duration of missing time.

New Pit Chalk Formation

Flinty Turonian chalk and the first flint line
The New Pit Chalk forms much of the cleanly bedded cliff: relatively smooth white to marly chalk with abundant black flint horizons. At Beer Head the first conspicuous flint line lies above the Branscombe Hardground. It cannot be correlated simply by counting flints with the first flint east of Beer, where flint starts lower, within the Holywell succession. The traditional Terebratulina lata Zone is named after a small ribbed brachiopod now also classified as Gyrosoria lata; the zonal name is retained for compatibility with BGS and GCR accounts.

Small ribbed brachiopods: a separately documented museum record
The 2009 study of Gyrosoria lata lists a complete shell, isolated valves and articulated shells on a shell-detrital sample from Beer Head, preserved in the National Museum in Prague. The specimen label says Middle Chalk, without an exact marker bed. This directly supports the locality occurrence of the tiny ribbed brachiopod, but not an abundance estimate or allocation to one of the named marls. The separate collection of 55 shells from White Cliff, Hooken, is not counted as Beer Head material.

Rowe’s 2-foot band: correlation with New Pit Marl 1
This lower conspicuous marl-rich band makes a recessed line across the Beer Head cliff and is labelled in Rowe’s original photograph and the modern GCR section. The historic “2-foot” label is a marker name, not a promise of a uniform thickness. Its westward overstep becomes dramatic in the main Hooken section, but the missing western succession is not projected back into the intact headland.

Rowe’s 4-foot band: correlation with New Pit Marl 2
A second prominent band of relatively flintless, marly chalk lies higher in the formation and forms another readily traceable groove. It is correlated with NP2 in the GCR Beer Head photograph. These basin-wide correlations should be distinguished from the directly observed historical marker bands. The quoted 3.5 m thickness in the centre of the wider Hooken site is not an exact Beer Head measurement. Fossil assemblages described for the formation as a whole cannot be assigned solely to this band without a bed-labelled specimen.

Pounds Pool Grey Bed
The annotated modern photograph identifies a distinct grey-bed marker above the 4-foot band and below the Glynde/Dowlands Marl on the west side of Beer Head. The consulted figure fixes its position but supplies neither an exact-headland thickness nor a separate fossil assemblage. It is therefore retained as a named marker without invented details or a formal member rank.

Glynde/Dowlands Marl
This persistent marl seam marks the transition from the smoother New Pit chalk to the nodular Lewes succession and approximates the base of Rowe’s Holaster planus Zone. It is also an important mechanical and weathering boundary: much of the high-level partial dissolution and subsidence stops at this horizon. The zonal boundary and formation boundary are close but should not be treated as inherently identical.

Lewes Nodular Chalk Formation

Upper Turonian to Coniacian nodular chalk
Hard, nodular and locally chalkstone-like beds contain flints, mineralised surfaces and thin marl seams. BGS describes a full 35–40 m succession at the Beer Head cliff system, while individual displaced bluffs preserve only parts of it. Heart-urchins are important: historical collecting from the cleft north of the headland documented Micraster forms, including records under the names M. praecursor and M. cortestudinarium. These are historical identifications, not newly revised determinations. Rowe also recorded Holaster placenta, one brachiopod identified as Terebratulina gracilis, and an unnamed wheel-shaped bryozoan from the lower, seaward cleft. The brachiopod is a separate historical record from the later Gyrosoria museum sample.

Tocher’s upper bluffs: about 17 m, separated by an inaccessible interval
The foundered bluffs above Beer Head expose about 17 m of chalk assigned in Tocher’s older scheme to the Pinhay Nodular and Clevelands Flinty Chalk units; only the former was sampled. Figure 27b explicitly separates the sampled bluff from the lower section by about 35 m labelled inaccessible. This is neither a fully measured continuous log nor evidence that the whole 35–40 m district Lewes thickness was sampled here.

Upper-bluff nodular chalk below Annis’ Knob Flint: Beer H2
Below the prominent semi-tabular flint, Tocher’s sampled bluff log depicts nodular chalk containing several resistant nodular hardgrounds and exposed-nodule intervals, with scattered nodular flints. Beer H2 lies within this lower package. Individual unnumbered ledges are shown graphically but lack securely stated separate thicknesses and fossil lists; their depiction is not converted into invented named beds.

Upper-bluff nodular chalk above Annis’ Knob Flint: Beer H3
Above the flint at the Beer H1 level, the log shows further nodular chalk and successive resistant hardground/nodule concentrations. Beer H3 samples this higher package. The three sampled levels produced only poor dinoflagellate-cyst assemblages; they do not document a continuously fossiliferous cliff or permit assignment of all composite-chart species to Beer Head.

Southerham Marl
A thin marl marker within the lower Lewes succession is individually labelled in the GCR photograph of the west side of Beer Head, above the Glynde marl group and below Caburn Marl. It supports correlation with the wider Chalk basin; no exact-headland thickness or independent fossil list is published with that marker in the sources used here.

Caburn Marl
Caburn Marl is the next individually identified marl marker in the photographed Beer Head succession. It lies below the conspicuous Bridgewick–Bopeep flints. The presence of this named horizon is documented, but a fossil collected from an unlabelled fallen block cannot be allocated to it solely from its appearance.

Bridgewick Flints
The Bridgewick flints are identified within the conspicuous paired development called Rowe’s “strong double flint line”. The GCR figure marks the Bridgewick and Bopeep package separately from the higher Annis’ Knob/Breaky Bottom Flint. No independent fossil assemblage or exact-headland thickness is assigned to the Bridgewick marker.

Bopeep Flints
The Bopeep flints form the other named component of the prominent double-flint package. These silica-rich replacements help correlate separate chalk faces, but a loose flint cannot be attributed to this particular horizon by shape alone. The source does not provide a distinct exact-headland fauna for the Bopeep marker.

Annis’ Knob / Breaky Bottom Flint
A particularly prominent nodular to semi-tabular flint is mapped high in the Beer Head section and shown at the Beer H1 sampling level in Tocher’s local high-bluff log. The name is shared with the separate Annis’ Knob exposure near Beer Harbour; using the marker name does not transfer that station’s fossil collection to Beer Head. The GCR correlates it with Rowe’s strong nodular flint line.

Lewes Flint
The high-level Twin Pillars at Beer Head include the Lewes Flint in their short preserved marker succession. This is a separate named flint horizon above the Annis’ Knob marker, not a new formation or a foreshore bed assumed to be exposed continuously.

Lewes Marl
The Twin Pillars also preserve the thin Lewes Marl, one of the basin-wide marker seams that makes these small high-level masses stratigraphically identifiable. No reliable exact-locality thickness or marker-specific fauna is supplied by the figure caption.

Cuilfail Zoophycos horizon
The high-level Twin Pillars expose the Cuilfail Zoophycos marker. The name refers to a distinctive trace-fossil-bearing horizon, not to a body fossil or a separate member. It is preserved in the high-level chalk package and should not be advertised as an easily reached shore-level fossil bed.

Sheet-flint near the old zonal boundary
Rowe’s thin tabular flint divided his Holaster planus and Micraster cortestudinarium zones at Beer Head. The same sheet-flint marker is labelled SF on the GCR photograph of Belay Bluff, below Navigation Marl. A historical faunal boundary drawn at the flint is not automatically the modern Turonian–Coniacian stage boundary.

Navigation Marl
Navigation Marl is labelled NM in the high Belay Bluff section and is represented in the Twin Pillars. It is Rowe’s marl seam within the Micraster cortestudinarium Zone, above the sheet-flint marker. The marl is useful for correlation even where solution and block movement have displaced the succession.

Hope Gap Hardground-equivalent level
The GCR description of the Twin Pillars follows the section upward through Navigation Marl to approximately the level of the Hope Gap Hardground equivalent. This is an approximate correlation, not a separately measured headland hardground with an established thickness or fossil list.

Chapel Rock Hardground and the top of the nodular succession
In the GCR framework a strongly mineralised hardground caps the Lewes Nodular Chalk and marks the change to softer Seaford chalk. At Beer Head the highest succession is preserved in solution-collapse pockets and blocks, so the regional name must not be taken to imply an accessible continuous ledge around the headland. The sources establish the boundary framework, rather than a modern bed-by-bed measured section through every pocket.

Seaford Chalk Formation

Lower Seaford chalk in high-level solution-collapse masses
The youngest Chalk at Beer Head is preserved in pockets and subsided masses above the main cliff, including the karstic collapse at the eastern end. It is softer white chalk with numerous flints and belongs to the lower, Coniacian part of the formation. Large fragments of the thick-shelled inoceramid bivalves Platyceramus and Volviceramus are the characteristic documented fossils. BGS gives up to 20 m for the lower Seaford preserved in the district; that is not a uniformly measured 20 m bed at Beer Head. The old blanket description of the whole headland Chalk as Santonian is therefore incorrect.

Seven Sisters Flint Band
The wider GCR photograph of the adjacent Hooken Landslip identifies the Seven Sisters Flint Band alongside Platyceramus and Volviceramus. This is a useful comparison for the lower Seaford preserved at Beer Head, but the caption alone does not demonstrate this particular flint in every headland collapse pocket. It must not be drawn as a continuous youngest bed across the headland. The GCR account also records paramoudra-type flints in the highest surviving chalk of the wider site.

Summit veneer: less than 0.5 m of chalky soil
At the highest point of Beer Head, Gallois found intact, unweathered chalk beneath a veneer of chalky soil and subsoil less than 0.5 m thick. This thin summit cover is a distinct observation from the much deeper solution hollows immediately beside it.

Adjacent solution hollows: about 30 m removed and filled
Immediately east and west of the highest point, dissolution removed the chalk down to the Dowlands Marl, a thickness of about 30 m. The voids contain subsided Clay-with-flints and Head deposits. These are younger superficial fillings, not a 30 m sedimentary member of the Chalk. Gallois proposed prolonged earlier partial dissolution followed by cold-climate weathering and gradual subsidence.

Eastern headland: partially dissolved chalk and intact younger masses
At the eastern end, a partially decalcified Lewes chalk layer up to 30 m thick contains large, coherent masses of intact younger chalk. Uneven subsidence separated blocks along former master joints; Dowlands Marl defines the base of the solution-affected interval. These blocks preserve the youngest local Chalk, including lower Seaford, but are not an undisturbed continuous vertical succession. This process is distinct from the great 1790 Hooken landslip farther west.

Exact-locality micropalaeontology and its limits
Tocher’s 1984 samples of the Upper Greensand and Beer Head Limestone at Beer Head yielded no dinoflagellate cysts. Three samples from the high-level chalk bluffs contained poor assemblages; the text singles out Senoniasphaera rotundata, while its composite chart also includes samples from other stations. Those neighbouring records are not copied into this locality. The Survey examined washings from Beer Head alongside Dover and Hitchin; its discussion of shell prisms, a few starfish ossicles and absence of fish remains is collective, so those observations are not assigned to Beer Head alone. The separate Beer column in the foraminiferal table securely records four identifications by F. Chapman: Textularia trochus, Cristellaria cultrata, Globigerina marginata and Anomalina ammonoides. These are the names printed in the Beer column of the original table, not modern taxonomic revisions. Modern foraminiferal zones inferred in the GCR from Beer Roads or Annis’ Knob are correlations, not direct sampling results from Beer Head.

References

BGS. Beer Head Limestone Formation, Lexicon entry BRHD. Current definition and historical-name status.

Edwards, R. A. and Gallois, R. W. (2004). Geology of the Sidmouth district, Sheets 326 and 340. British Geological Survey.

Gallois, R. W. (2004). The stratigraphy of the Upper Greensand (Cretaceous) of south-west England. Geoscience in south-west England, 11, 21–29; especially figures 3–4.

Gallois, R. W. (2005). Large-scale partial dissolution of the Chalk of the Devon coast and its engineering significance. Geoscience in south-west England, 11, 123–131.

Hopson, P. M. (2005). A stratigraphical framework for the Upper Cretaceous Chalk of England and Scotland. BGS Research Report RR/05/01.

Jukes-Browne, A. J. and Hill, W. (1900, 1903, 1904). The Cretaceous Rocks of Britain, volumes I–III. Geological Survey memoirs; volume I, pp. 199, 206–207; volume II, pp. 134–136, 438, 510–511; volume III, p. 130.

Mortimore, R. N., Wood, C. J. and Gallois, R. W. (2001). Hooken Cliff, including the Beer Head sections and figures 3.16–3.24. British Upper Cretaceous Stratigraphy, Geological Conservation Review 23.

Rowe, A. W. (1903). The zones of the White Chalk of the English coast. III. Devon. Proceedings of the Geologists’ Association, 18, 1–51; pp. 19–20 and plate IX.

Tocher, B. A. (1984). Palynostratigraphy of uppermost Albian to basal Coniacian (Cretaceous) sediments of the western Anglo-Paris Basin. PhD thesis, City of London Polytechnic; pp. 59–63, 154 and figures 27, 40.

BGS (2011). South Dorset and south-east Devon and its World Heritage Coast. Special memoir, Chalk Group.

Withers, T. H. (1951). Some Jurassic and Cretaceous crabs (Prosoponidae). Bulletin of the British Museum (Natural History), Geology, 1, 171–186, plates 15–17; pp. 179–181 and plate 16.

Klompmaker, A. A., Artal, P. and Gulisano, G. (2011). The Cretaceous crab Rathbunopon: revision, a new species and new localities. Neues Jahrbuch für Geologie und Paläontologie, Abhandlungen, 260, 191–202.

Sklenář, J. and Simon, E. (2009). Brachiopod Gyrosoria Cooper, 1973: a comparative palaeoecological, stratigraphical and taxonomical study. Bulletin of Geosciences, 84, 437–464.