GeoGraph - photograph every grid square

Working gravel pit near the National Memorial Arboretum

From the northern edge of the arboretum looking west to the Lafarge equipment still extracting sand and gravel from the site. The local red marl was deposited here about 265 million years ago when the area was shallow lakes and sandy desert. The arboretum itself stands on restored land, from which aggregates were extracted in the 1980s and 1990s. In 2002, quarrying operations here discovered an extremely well-preserved skull of a woolly rhinoceros, which became extinct during the last Ice Age, some 30,000 years ago. It is now in the Natural History Museum in London.