Cenozoic pedogenesis and landform development in south-east England

Summary Soils are useful stratigraphically because they mark land surfaces of significant duration. They also provide valuable palaeo-environmental evidence complementary to that obtained from sedimentary successions. In south-east England both buried and unburied soils are broadly divided on field morphology and petrographic characteristics into those formed during the Flandrian Stage and others (palaeo-argillic soils) dating from the Cromerian and later interglacial stages. Even where the latter are derived from pre-Quaternary deposits, as on the Chalk dipslope, their profile characteristics and stratigraphic relationships to remnants of early Quaternary marine deposits suggest development during the Quaternary rather than in the Tertiary. Although most major landscape features were probably inherited from the late Tertiary, the entire land surface of south-east England suffered significant Quaternary erosion, and there are no definite relics of Tertiary pedogenesis.