There is limited parking for 10 cars by the fence by the entrance. Please car share if you know others attending. Once these places are filled, you’ll be directed to other parking places in the surrounding streets.

This walk will start in Charfield (new) village and climb up to the church in the old village onto the rim of the North Bristol coalfield, across folded Silurian, Old Red Sandstone and Carboniferous Limestone, the latter forming a heavily quarried plateau.

We will then descend back to the village, where we will take lunch (either packed lunch or in the Vintage Birdcage Cakery opposite the car park). After lunch we will head alongside the railway to examine the remains of a lava flow that was erupted 430 million years ago.

After crossing the railway we will enter the realm of the much younger rocks (less than 200 million years!) of “lowland Britain”, here paradoxically rising much higher than the older rocks (which they once buried). The low ground formed by the red mudstones of the Mercia Mudstone is broken by the first of 4 prominent steps in the landscape produced by more resistant beds…in this case the sandstones and lmestones of the Penarth Group at the boundary between the Triassic and Jurassic periods. We will climb Elbury Hill, the small isolated outlier of these beds left behind as the main escarpment retreated (as in the manner of Cam Long Down and Smallpox Hill left by the retreat of the Cotswold limestone escarpment).

We will then return to Charfield (possibly afternoon tea at the Birdcage; should we get there before 4.30pm).