page_title: Northfield, Birmingham
section_title: Geology
hierarchical_section_title: Northfield, Birmingham / Geography / Geology
caption_attribution_description: English: A quarry cutting from the Bilberry Hill quarry on Bilberry Hill, within the Lickey Hills Country Park. The Ordovician age Lickey Quartzite is folded into a recumbent fold with the fold axis running just below the top of the quarry face see here
context_page_description: Northfield is a small town and also a small residential area on the southern outskirts of metropolitan Birmingham, England, and near the boundary with Worcestershire. It is also a council constituency, managed by its own district committee. The constituency includes the wards of Kings Norton, Longbridge, Weoley Castle and the smaller ward of Northfield that includes West Heath and Turves Green.
  Mentioned in the Domesday Book and formerly a small village, then included in north Worcestershire, Northfield only became part of Birmingham in 1919 after it had been rapidly expanded and developed in the period prior to World War I. The northern reaches of Northfield fall within the Bournville model village and the southern housing estates were originally built by Austin Motors for their workforce.
  A centre of the Midlands nail making industry during the 19th century and home to both the Kalamazoo paper factory and the Austin motor company's Longbridge factory in the 20th century, today Northfield is predominantly a residential and dormitory suburb for metropolitan Birmingham.
context_section_description: Northfield is built on a well-drained stretch of gravel and sand that had been laid down under a prehistoric shallow sea and enriched by sediments from ice age glaciers. The natural heath land had grown on a flatter area between the nearby Lickey Hills and Redhill. The Northfield area includes a wide geological range of rocks of various ages. The stratigraphic sequence, which is the basis for the area's diversity of landscape and habitat, comprises:
  Barnt Green rocks – Precambrian tuffs and volcanic grits
  Lickey Quartzite – a Cambrian quartzite
  Rubery sandstone – a fossiliferous sandstone of lower Silurian age
  Keele Clay – a Carboniferous clay
  Clent Breccia – a Permian breccia that consists of angular fragments mostly of volcanic rock embedded in a sandy matrix of the same general composition. Clent breccia is the most common sandstone under central Northfield.
  Bunter Pebble Beds – beds of Triassic water-worn pebbles
  Keuper marl – a late Triassic sandstone. Deep wells, sunk through the Keuper formation into the Bunter sandstones below were used to supply the whole of Birmingham with drinking water before the Elan Valley scheme was carried through. Examples of such wells occurred in Northfield, Selly Oak and at Longbridge.
  Northfield stands on a small part of the Northfield—Dudley plateau, which constitutes part of the South Staffordshire Uplands and was covered by a massive glacier that stretched all the way from Wales during the last ice age approximately 10,000 – 13,000 years ago. The evidence for this lies in the occurrence of numerous "erratics" or far-travelled ice-borne stones, some of which are of immense size, as well as the vast deposits of glacial sands and gravels in the district. The composition of many of these boulders shows that they originated from as far away as Scotland or Snowdonia in Wales, such as the massive boulder discovered while Rowheath playing fields were laid out. Another large boulder is the one after which the Great Stone Inn is named. This glacial erratic from North Wales stood for ten thousand years at the corner of Church Hill and Church Road until it was moved several metres into the adjacent pound during the 1950s. Others indicate a more local origin, such as the Wrekin district in Shropshire. The subsoil layers under Northfield, West Heath and Turves Green also contains a coal seam that would indicate that an extensive prehistoric tropical forest once existed here.
caption: A quarry cutting on Bilberry Hill showing the layers of Lickey Quartzite.
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