Michael McKimm | ontheendlesshere

Poems from Michael's Fossil Sunshine, from a sequence focusing on different points of Flamborough Head

Danes Dyke

We are waiting for results from Sheffield

on the sample taken from the horizontal

borehole. Initially we thought the gravels

could be correlatives of interglacials

found further west – do you follow? –

but now we read in their significance

the movement of the North Sea Lobe

of the last ice sheet in eastern England.

Freeze and thaw has worked the sediments.

On top of these are laminated muds

and rippled sands, suggesting ice was present

to the south. But we’re not wizened Druids

with hazel wands. This is just our impulse.

We’re eagerly awaiting the results.

Sewerby

We take a sample from the buried cliff:

raised beach shingle, chalk, the Skipsea Till,

coarse and imbricated gravels. We lift

small cupfuls to the microscope, label

hippopotamus, hyena, straight-tusked

elephant, bison, deer and water vole.

We sort the flints from temperate molluscs,

wild erratics found in kettle holes.

Thermoluminescence dates the blown sand

to a period mid-Ipswichian.

Going further back, we see then how the land

in fact curved west away from Bridlington,

and where we took the rocks, the cliff we walked,

did not exist, was low Cretaceous chalk.