The Making of the Landscape

Why is Hall Green so called ? Whence came the clay, sand and stones of our gardens ? Why is the Cole so small when its valley is so large ? To find the answers we must look back to when the landscape was being formed - but the following is NOT a complete geological history of the district.

Fifty million years ago the residents of Hall Green were few and fishy. They swam in a vast shallow lake, which resembled the Dead Sea in being hot, very salty, and below sea level. Enormous quantities of fine-grained material were washed down by floods from surrounding mountains and deposited on the lake bed. During uncountable millenia red clay layers many hundreds of feet thick were so laid down.

Climatic conditions changed, the lake vanished at last. The red plain tilted slightly towards the north-east. Rain found small fissures in the clay, flowed down them, and created watercourses. The Cole valley was formed and side streams made wadis into it. But the clay desert was only lightly grooved as yet.

A visitor from outer space to our district during the most recent Ice Age (say 50,000 years ago) would be unable to get within two miles of it - two vertical miles, that is, for the land was buried beneath ten thousand feet of ice. Conditions on the surface were like those in Central Greenland today : Solihull would have been welcome to claim it all. Advancing ice-sheets had ground the tops from the Welsh Mountains and pushed the crumbled rock into our area, mixed with masses of softer material. When the great thaw came at last, this 'drift' was left strewn over the landscape : hereabout it formed a thin, fairly continuous layer, composed of water-worn stones, sand and clay in variable mixture, with a few larger boulders.

Mighty floods from dwindling glaciers swept down the Cole valley, washing away much of the drift, deepening the river bed into a gorge. When conditions stabilised, ours was a sodden landscape : rain and countless tributary rills were starting to smooth and bevel the valley sides. Drift still covered the Hall Green plateau and the ridges between streams, but raw clay was exposed on valley sides. Below, a swollen river oozed through a morass of silt. Vegetation returned, animals and men followed. They found the plateau dry and firm, patchily wooded, with heath on the stoniest areas. From scores of springs at the edges of the drift, brooks coursed down the clay slopes : these were now hidden under dense oak and underbrush forest.

The plateau provided relatively easy travelling, the slopes were muddy and the woods impenetrable. The valley floor was a largely uncrossable bog : but here and there deposits of gravel made the approaches and river bed firmer. There were discovered by animals and used by the hunters who followed their trails.