A foray to North Somerset

30th December: with Tav and Alex.

Our first destination was to the location of Tickenham Rock Shelter, unfortunately this turned out to be more difficult than anticipated. Tav wanted to check the co-ords and description for the MCRA, Alex was interested in a possible glacial origin, and there was an archaeological interest for me, including Cadbury Camp.

The current MCRA grid ref. is wrong and we spent quite a bit of time wandering about. Eventually I googled ‘Rock Shelter’ and found a property of that name in the right location, unfortunately the owners were out, so this will have to wait for another day.

Next destination was the Clevedon estuary shoreline. First to Margarent’s Bay to look at the carvings in Babyface Cave, the cave is really a gap in amongst some large blocks of conglomerate.

There is also some good geological features around here, including an unconformity between Triassic conglomerate and Devonian sandstones.

Then along to Ladye Bay to peer into the cave sites there, more great geology and we noted some more possible carvings of uncertain date close to a small cave.

As time was running short Tav decided to give Swiss Valley a miss today and so, our final excursion was to check out a couple of sites on Strawberry Hill, Clevedon. We, quickly located the first target, recording was completed and we moved on to the next.

After a good deal of scrambling we located the second site, then proceeded to check out the rock exposures along the top of a steep and precarious hill slope. When this had been achieved we returned to the car.

An enjoyable day out in North Somerset done we returned home, and we didn’t go to the pub!

Author: mendipgeoarch

Archaeologist, geologist, speleologist.