The East Anglia Region - Southern England - page 238

FIG 224. Sketch cross-section of the uppermost crust across East Anglia. Located on
Figure 226.
The type of bedrock appearing near the surface in different parts of the Region has
a major influence upon the scenery, at least locally. The succession shown in Figure
225 generalises the thickness of the main layers and the time of their deposition over
the last 230 million years.
The earliest information comes from the northwest of the Region, where the bed-
rock, of Triassic age, consists largely of red mudstones deposited by rivers and streams
in low-lying ground between low hills (Fig. 226). At this time, the area to the southeast
consisted of a landscape of uplands made of London Platform bedrock, more than 300
million years old, where sediments did not accumulate. This same platform feature can
be traced below the surface under the southern North Sea and the Low Countries, and
is often referred to as the London-Brabant Landmass (Brabant is an old name applied
to the land roughly equivalent to present-day Belgium.