Introduction
The Coast of England and Wales is presented with an Introduction followed by 24 illustrated sections comprising the counties of England and three divisions of Wales. In each section the coast is described in a sequence that runs from north to south ( Cumbria to Cornwall ), west to east ( Cornwall to Kent ) and south to north ( Essex to Northumberland ).
In England and Wales most of the stages in the geological column are somewhere represented. A notable gap is the Miocene (5–23 million years ago), when Britain was a land area, subject to erosion rather than deposition, apart from some gravel deposits, while some stages, such as the Rhaetic and the Palaeocene, are better developed elsewhere, particularly in Europe.
There has been tectonic uplift in the north and west of Britain and subsidence in the south and east. This transverse tilting results in the oldest (Pre-Cambrian) rocks outcropping in parts of Anglesey while the youngest are in East Anglia. The pattern has been...
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Bird, E. (2010). England and Wales. In: Bird, E.C.F. (eds) Encyclopedia of the World's Coastal Landforms. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4020-8639-7_58
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