The Old Coastline of the Wash

THE paper describes how various old salt-marsh edges around the Wash were traced s part of a field study into the processes of salt-marsh advance in this area. It is sought to establish that salt-marsh advance is not a continuous process, but that foreshore saltings tend to become stabilized when they are a 13-1z 2l mile wide, with a wider belt of mud flats in front of them. In the mud-flat areas accretion, caused by continuous deposition of sediment from suspension, is balanced by side erosion due to meandering drainage creeks and by various smaller-scale erosional processes. Further salt-marsh advance only occurs when this balance is upset, either by man-made works, or natural catastrophe. By use of aerial photographs and trenching various old salt-marsh edges were uncovered at Wrangle, Freiston, Wolferton and in South Holland. They support the view that, before reclamation schemes were started in the seventeenth century, the foreshore of the Wash was not progressively changing. A hypothesis, supported by the strata of the trench in South Holland, is put forward to account for the excep? tional width of the saltings reclaimed in South Holland in the seventeenth century

Geography · Aeolian processes and effects · Coastal and Marine Dynamics · Geological formations and processes · Geology · Oceanography

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  Open Access•Konstantinos Tsompanoglou, Ian W Croudace et al.•The Holocene•2010

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• Britain's Changing Climate

  H H Lamb•Geographical Journal•1967

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