Stanton Harcourt

Also within

Oxfordshire County

Condition (Natural England)

Geology & landscape

Geological Period: Quaternary

Landscape processes: Periglacial

Description

Area, 0.68 hectares 1.68 ac Description These gravel deposits, near Stanton Harcourt, represent the Pleistocene Summertown Radley Terrace of the Upper Thames. Important evidence of periglacial conditions has been demonstrated in these deposits, including large and complex ice wedge casts and a widespread cryoturbated horizon. Silt lenses within the gravels have yielded molluscs indicative of cold conditions. However, beneath these cold climate deposits, an extremely important and localised interglacial deposit has been uncovered, occupying a channel cut into the Oxford Clay bedrock. The channel contains clastic and organic sediments which have yielded a varied vertebrate fauna, wood and other plant remains and a rich molluscan fauna of warm climatic affinities. The relationship between these interglacial sediments and other warm climate deposits in the upper levels of the Summertown Radley Terrace nearby is by no means clear, although it has been suggested that a hitherto unrecognised stage is represented at Stanton Harcourt. The site thus provides a major reserve of this terrace and its fossiliferous deposits, on which further work is needed and for which the deposits here are of prime importance.