West Country Tour … Hartland Point … part 11 …

Hercules Promontory from Ptolemy’s geography, Shipwreck Coast and Sailors’ Grave, Charles Kingsley’s 1855 description in “Westward Ho!” … show us unusual geology amongst spectacular coastline walks, incredible landscapes hiding history in its combes, hanging valley waterfalls, ancient woodlands … now protected by its status as An Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty.

Folded Twisted rocks (shales and mudstones)
 at the Hartland Heritage Coast

Hartland Point faces out into the Bristol Channel a 30 mile (45 km) breadth of water to St Govan’s Head in Wales … marking the tenuous boundary with the Atlantic Ocean.

Bristol Channel: showing Hartland Point on the Devon
coast, and St Govan's Head in Wales (both in blue)

Waves stream and rattle across 3,000 miles of Ocean, nothing to break them or control their movement, until they meet the waters of the Bristol Channel (more specifically the Celtic Sea) and land masses such as Hartland Point or Lundy Island about 12 miles (19 km) off the Devon coast.

“When on Hartland’s tempest-furrowed shore

Breaks the long swell from farthest Labrador.”

Hartland village, with the very tall towered
church ... these towers were signposts for the
sailors in the Channel

Though this disturbance is nothing compared to that of the geological upheavals of yore.

Suddenly after crossing into Devon, a shout was out … go left ‘old girl’ go left … off the main road I, as the driver, obeyed, we made a sharp left towards the coast … down tiny lanes – but how fascinating it is … geologically so interesting.

I had no idea why we were going in this direction – in fact still don’t - one of the frustrations of just having the trip time together and not seeing Jenny again before she returned to Vancouver Island.  But I am delighted we turned left.

A geologically unusual hanging valley

This hard-rock coast tells its own story … our soft chalk coast here in Sussex erodes back, we get hanging valleys but they erode over time.  The hanging valleys on the coast line of North Devon just hang (are truncated by the hard cliff line) – streams pour over the edge and are a geological rarity.

The rocks of Hartland Quay are the remains of a mountain range … way back 320 million years ago sedimentary rocks were deposited in a shallow sea during the Carboniferous (coal-bearing) period.

The layers are sequences of shales and mudstones representing the remains of sub-marine “avalanches” of sediments called turbidites.   At the same time as this was happening at Hartland, coals were being deposited in swamps, forming the South Wales coalfields.

Movement of the Supercontinents through the eras:
I know this is not in focus - but it is larger
than the one I might have shown.  It comes from
  Pangaea inWikipedia ... and shows
from top left Permian, Triassic, Jurassic,
Cretaceous with the last image
showing the continents as they are  today

Plate tectonics caused the collision of two super continents with (what would be) Hartland Quay in the middle.  Devon was at the southern margin of a super-continent called Laurasia, which collided with the super-continent Pangaea – to the South.

As these two mega-continents collided during the Variscan Orogeny the rocks at Hartland Quay were buckled and bent, producing the spectacular chevron shaped folds exposed in the cliffs today – the top surface was then, over the eras, eroded.

In ‘recent times’ – the Ice Age inheritance … the coldest time was about 18,000 years ago … this was when the ice sheet covered Wales but only the effects of the periglacial conditions affected Devon and Cornwall.  This would explain Maer Lake, Bude (see my previous post) being peripheral to the ice in origin. 

Harsh landscape, hard rocks ... 

The landscape would have been dramatically affected by glacial action … frost heave, the push of the outer edges of the glacial covering (boulders, large scree), reduction in vegetation able to survive the severity of the winters … severely modifying the geology of the area.

Getting our heads around the timescale involved … the Alps and Himalayas are merely 50 million years old, (the Rockies are between 80 and 55 million years old) … the continental collision which created the Variscan mountains occurred 290 million years ago – ample time for rivers, slope movements and other erosional forces to reduce these mountains to their roots …

Hercules Promontory - Hartland Lighthouse

We know early Neolithic man was here (from my previous posts), also we have evidence of the Romans from Ptomely - his Hercules Promontory description, and from the milestones they left …

… Saxon Hartland was originally owned by King Alfred the Great, it later passed to Lady Gytha, the mother of King Harold of Hastings fame.

Hartland coastline looking south-westwards

The small inlets were invaluable to early traders, merchants and  naval commanders;  In the 1500s John Hawkins, Francis Drake (his cousin) and Walter Raleigh sponsored the first quay at Hartland … however the Atlantic storms made its maintenance difficult, finally being abandoned in 1893.

Clovelly harbour - a similar
construction that has withstood
the test of waves and time

… the breath-taking prospect of sea-cliffs calls intrepid walkers, biologists, geologists and scientists to this Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty – which still reveals its secrets in the Celtic Seas, or on the medieval shore … weathered and not much changed over time.

Charles Kingsley in his Westward Ho! reminds us of this fractured coastline in Chapter VI of his story …

The Combes of the Far West:  … each has its black field of jagged shark’s tooth rock which paves the cove from side to side, streaked with here and there a pink line of shell sand, and laced with white foam from the eternal surge, stretching in parallel lines out to the westward, in strata set upright on edge, or tilted towards each other at strange angles by primevil earth-quakes; - - such is the “mouth” – as those coves are called and such the jaw of teeth which they display, one rasp of which would grind abroad the timbers of the stoutest ship.”

A photo of a painting from 1814 - showing the
harbour as it would have been ... 

To landward, all richness, softness, and peace; to seaward, a waste and howling wilderness of rock and roller, barren to fisherman, and hopeless to the shipwrecked mariner.”

Super-continent collision ... bent, twisted ... part of
thje "V" of the chevron type formations left

That was where the shout ‘to the left’ led us … then we wended our way along those tiny lanes unchanged for many a century northwards past Clovelly, Westward Ho!, Bideford – where we had a wander, onward to Barnstaple, reaching Ilfracombe our next destination, where there are some tales to tell.

I hope you get a feel for the place … I’m not really sure why I bothered to write a post after reading Kingsley’s brilliant description? … a wordsmith par excellence …


Here's a link to Geology of North Devon - see point 39: Hartland Point to Hartland Quay - - showing us that the rocks are mudstones and sandstones.

Next up will be a celebratory post …

Hilary Melton-Butcher 
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