Geological resources and their exploitation in the Berkshire chalklands of the later nineteenth century: a first survey

The Chalk Group downlands and the closely associated outcrops of early Tertiary sediments provided to farmers, estate owners, and business men during the later nineteenth and early twentieth century a wide variety of earth-materials that were exploited at many hundreds of sites for mainly local but also regional needs. Chalk was used for soil-conditioning, road metal, flooring and hard-standing, as a walling material, and for lime-burning and the manufacture of whiting and putty. The early Tertiary silts and clays (Reading Beds, London Clay, Bagshot Beds) that unconformably overlie the Chalk Group, together with the closely associated Clay-with-Flints, were the basis of a major building-ceramic industry (bricks, tiles, chimney pots, drain-pipes) that served both regional and local markets. More than ninety kiln sites are known. Flints present in or derived from the Upper Chalk were extracted at many sites for hard-core, rough walling, typically combined with brick, and for facing and repairing important buildings, such as Victorian churches. Today almost no physical evidence of these various activities has survived in the landscape. Pits and scrapes are no longer evident in the fields and along the lanes, and smoking chimneys no longer rise above estates, villages, and towns such as Reading and Wokingham. Improvements in transportation, and a lowering of transport costs, have effected a transformation of the landscape.