This is a nice straightforward and easy roadside EarthCache on a nice quiet country lane.
There is plenty of space to park safely whilst you examine the location.
Now for the information and geology.
The Cotton Cross is one of 3 crosses placed to celebrate the millennium, the others being located in Waverton and Vicar’s Cross.
Local farmer Edward Walley created, funded and restored this superb cross at the site of Cotton Gate on Plough Lane, adjacent to his family farm at Cotton Abbotts. This welcome addition to local history tells travellers the story of the local squire who was a devout Puritan and destroyed the original crosses of many local churches and villages in the area.
The cross is built out of a stone that is very well known in these parts and very destinctive in its colour.
Cheshire is made up of 225 million year old Triassic sandstone.
The mid-Cheshire ridge and its outliers are formed of layer upon layer of Triassic sandstones and pebble beds. These sedimentary rocks were laid down in semi-arid desert conditions, interspersed with occasional flash floods between 225 and 195 million years ago.
Dramatic sandstone cliffs and caves crop up all along the trail and today walkers can see the layers of rock formed over countless thousands of years by alternating wind-blown sand, rivers and floods. These layers of sand and sediment were then consolidated over yet more millions of years by compression and mineral cementation.
Many different minerals were deposited in the solution around the sand grains in the porous sandstone, of these, the most common mineral was iron oxide.
These minerals help cement the sand grains together and the iron oxide gives the sandstone its striking, rich red and brown colouration.
Around the same time that the rock was being formed, evaporation of a warm, shallow sea or lagoon created the extensive underground salt deposits that lie beneath central Cheshire. Natural brine springs here have been exploited since at least the Iron Age.
Upheavals in the Earth’s crust later vertically fractured or ‘faulted’ the horizontal sedimentary sandstones, which were then pushed upwards and tilted to create the modern ridges that you can see today.
More recently though in geological terms, some time between 65 million and 1.6 million years ago, copper and other metals in the solution were deposited from groundwater percolating along faults in the sandstone.
These uplifted rocks were gradually eroded over the millennia, leaving the harder strata of the mid-Cheshire ridge protruding above the Cheshire Plain.
Then came the Ice Ages: a series of glaciations interspersed with warmer periods, during the most recent Ice Age, between 75,000 and 10,000 years ago, a vast ice sheet pushed in from the Irish Sea basin, depressing the surface of the earth and tearing away rock from the front of Helsby and Frodsham hills.
The exact depth of the ice sheet can only be guessed at but it almost certainly overrode the mid-Cheshire ridge.
In its stately progress down from the north and northwest, the ice sheet carried debris and rocks from southwest Scotland, northeast Ireland and the Lake District. But when the climate eventually started to warm up towards the end of the Ice Age, between 20,000 and 10,000 years ago, the ice front gradually ‘retreated’. As the ice receded, it dropped a thick layer of boulder clay or glacial till across much of Cheshire.
The limey clays represent shell-rich deposits dredged from what had once been the floor of the Irish Sea covered most of the low lying areas and only the mid-Cheshire ridge remained largely uncovered by glacial till – leaving exposed the older, distinctive Triassic sandstone rocks that we can see protruding out today.
Now for the fun EarthCache part, the logging requirements.
In order to log a find you are required to complete the following questions and tasks and send your answers to us via the email address on our profile or via the use of the message centre.
Any finds logged without completing the tasks and sending us their answers will have their log deleted.
A photo on your found log is now a logging requirement (EarthCache guidelines) anyone logging a find without a photo will have the log deleted.
Using the information supplied and examining the cross please complete the following:
1. At the listed coordinates please describe what you see in front of you.
2. Explain what rock the Cheshire ridge and the cross made up of?
3. What period does this rock come from?
4. Is this rock described as metamorphic, igneous or sedimentary?
5. What mineral gives the rock that the cross is made from it's very distinctive colour?
6. Having read through the details above explain when was the most recent ice age recorded and what happened in Helsby and Frodsham at that time?
7. Examine the cross and its plinth and describe the texture of them both, how do they differ?
8. The plinth the cross sits on has various inscriptions on it, go to the rear of the cross, what does the inscription say?
9. In order to demonstrate that you have visited the location a photo of yourself or your GPS in front of the cross must be posted on your find log.
Please do not add any answers to your find log.
Enjoy your visit and happy caching.