Old Cliffe Hill and Whitwick quarries Charnwood Forest

On a grey but fine Saturday morning the field party gathered at the offices of the New Cliffe Hill Quarry at the start of an excursion aimed at exploring two facets of Charnwood Forest’s Precambrian geology. At the Old Cliffe Hill Quarry, rocks representing the very final intrusive stage of Precambrian magmatic activity are well displayed. By contrast, at Whitwick Quarry, a diverse assemblage of massive to fragmental igneous rocks is related to the earlier, extrusive phase of volcanic activity that was responsible for the accumulation of the volcano-sedimentary sequences forming the eastern outcrops of the Charnian Supergroup. Both quarries also offer sections through the highly irregular unconformity between Precambrian and Triassic rocks, and in particular they reveal the details of ‘wadis’, which are remnants of the Charnwood landscape as it existed about 240 million years ago. Safety regulations precluded the close examination of the higher quarry faces, but good examples of the range of lithologies abounded in the various piles of quarry waste, and were augmented by information obtained during previous visits by the excursion leader.