Known more for its literary connections with Jane Austen
and the gardens of the naturalist Gilbert White at Selborne,
the Alresford district’s typically gentile English countryside
seen in the Alresford district is fundamentally a product of
the underlying geology. Commencing in the east, a journey
westwards begins on the low lying sandy heaths and heavy
clay pastureland around Bordon and Woolmer Forest,
developed from the Lower Cretaceous sands and clays.
Further south-east around Petersfield, the characteristic
ridge and vale country is founded on the alternating sands
and clays of the Lower Cretaceous Hythe and Sandgate
formations.
R ising steeply above the lowlands is the indented and
landslipped Upper Greensand scarp, behind which the land
slopes gently down to small villages such as Selborne and
East Worldham before rising steeply again up the Chalk
escarpment which forms perhaps the most striking feature.
This scarp, running north–south across the sheet district
effectively divides the region into two. Above the scarp the
high hills capped by clay-with-flint around Medstead and
Four Marks gently descend eastward down the long gentle
dip slopes of the Chalk to the headwaters of the Itchen
around New Alresford. The majority of the East Hampshire
Downs with its dry valleys and gently rolling hills is underlain
by the Chalk.
T he landscape seen today is the result of a very long
geological history which stretches back to the Early Jurassic
and beyond. The rocks at surface and those beneath the district
give valuable information for the understanding of such
major earth history events as the opening of the Atlantic and
the Channel Basin, the drowning of most of Europe during
the Cretaceous Period, the Alpine earth movements and the
wide climatic variations in our most recent past.
T hese events have also created the conditions for the
development of oil and gas and their entrapment in the rocks
at depth, a feature which manifests itself in the ‘nodding
donkeys’ pumping oil to the surface at places such as
Humbly Grove just to the north of the district
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