yards. Mr. Gilpin also informed me that among the numerous faults about Church bridge there was always found six or eight yards of red clay in the fault; the fault having that width, and being filled with red clay.
In consequence of these numerous faults it is impossible to lay down upon the maps the outcrops of the coals in any intelligible manner. The dotted lines drawn on the map represent the general approximate boundary of the area within which the respective coals may be found, rather than their actual outcrop. Even where they arc not broken by actual faults they appear as they approach the surface to flatten and undulate, which undulation of the beds, combined with that of the surface, causes each bed to crop in and out several tics successively before its final disappearance.
Added to all these difficulties is that caused by the occurrence of vast quantities of drift, as much as 60 feet of running sand having been sometimes found, as well as clay and boulders. The boulders are many of them granite and often of very large size.
The most southerly of the shafts that can be said to belong to the Wyrley district are two near the Warstone. One of these, situated just about where the "o" of "Warstone" is engraved on the map, has the Wyrley Bottom or Eight-foot coal at a depth of 180 feet (60 yards), while in another pit, about 200 yards to the eastward of it, that coal is only 105 feet (35 yards) deep. The Cannel coal accordingly must crop between these two shafts. At the coal-pits now at work immediately to the cast of the Old Mitre, the Cannel coal was only 10 yards deep. It must, therefore, crop a very little way to the eastward of these shafts.
At Mr. Mills's new colliery to the westward of the Old Mitre (just where the "'T'" of "The" is engraved in the map) the Cannel coal is 396 feet (132 yards) deep, proving, with the gentle dip of the measures, that there must be a fault with a large downthrow to the west, between these two places. The amount of this downthrow is stated at 65 yards (195 feet). The dip of the beds on the downside of this fault is about west-north-west, in which direction they will pass obliquely under the red clays, &e, of Essington Wood. By means of these red clays and the New and Old coal workings on the opposite side of the lane, the fault can be traced by Holly Bank and the Warstone up to Cheslyn Hey, where it probably runs into the western boundary fault.
Its course is about north by east, and there is another little fault parallel to it, some distance east of the Old Mitre, with a downthrow to the west of 15 feet (5 yards).[1]
South of the Essington pits little or nothing is known either of the constitution of the Coal-measures or the "lie and position" of the beds till we reach the greenstone of Wednesfield on the one side, and the Bentley and Bloxwich works on the other.
An old shaft sunk a little east of the New Invention seems to have gone through nothing but Greenstone, of which large blocks may still be found under the soil full of veins of some zeolitic mineral. Other sinkings are reported to have been made formerly to the north of this, between Essington and Pelsall in the district called Essington Wood, and the measures were said to be all destroyed by white rock and green rock trap. White rock trap is to be seen in the cutting of the railway near Landywood, which is the farthest point north at which it is known to exist."
It is also found, as before mentioned, south of Bloxwich about Birch Hills and thence to Pouk Hill, burrowing in the lower measures, and dislocated with them by the various faults that traverse them.
- ↑ We are indebted to Mr. Beckett for much of the above information, he having gained it from Messrs. Mills, and from Mr. Smallmen, the ground bailiff, of Wednesbury, as also from Mr. Chekley, of Spring Hill, near Bloxwich.
