| Site of Special Scientific Interest | |
View of an area of the site which is now a field | |
| Area of Search | Essex |
|---|---|
| Grid reference | TL 911243 |
| Interest | Geological |
| Area | 29.5 hectares |
| Notification | 1986 |
| Location map | Magic Map |
Marks Tey Brickpit is a 29.5 hectare geological Site of Special Scientific Interest in Marks Tey in Essex. [1] [2] It is a Geological Conservation Review site. [3]
A Site of Special Scientific Interest (SSSI) in Great Britain or an Area of Special Scientific Interest (ASSI) in the Isle of Man and Northern Ireland is a conservation designation denoting a protected area in the United Kingdom and Isle of Man. SSSI/ASSIs are the basic building block of site-based nature conservation legislation and most other legal nature/geological conservation designations in the United Kingdom are based upon them, including national nature reserves, Ramsar sites, Special Protection Areas, and Special Areas of Conservation. The acronym "SSSI" is often pronounced "triple-S I".
Marks Tey is a large village and electoral ward in Essex, England located six miles west of Colchester.
Essex is a county in the south-east of England, north-east of London. One of the home counties, it borders Suffolk and Cambridgeshire to the north, Hertfordshire to the west, Kent across the estuary of the River Thames to the south, and London to the south-west. The county town is Chelmsford, the only city in the county. For government statistical purposes Essex is placed in the East of England region.
This site has a record of pollen throughout the Hoxnian interglacial around 400,000 years ago, and this is the best vegetational record for any British interglacial site. Seasonal layers in lake sediments have made it possible to estimate the duration of the Hoxnian. [1] Clay deposited in the lake is quarried at a brickworks on the site, and this exposes layers above the Hoxnian ones of a later colder period. There is also a Grade II listed early nineteenth-century bottle kiln and brick tile works on the site. [4] [5]
The Hoxnian Stage is a middle Pleistocene stage of the geological history of the British Isles. It precedes the Wolstonian Stage and follows the Anglian Stage. It is equivalent to Marine Isotope Stage 11. Marine Isotope Stage 11 started 424,000 years ago and ended 374,000 years ago. The Hoxnian divided into sub-stages Ho I to Ho IV.
An interglacial period is a geological interval of warmer global average temperature lasting thousands of years that separates consecutive glacial periods within an ice age. The current Holocene interglacial began at the end of the Pleistocene, about 11,700 years ago.
The site is overgrown apart from a small area used for brick making. [4] It is private land with no public access, but a small area, which is now a field, can be seen from Marks Tey railway station car park.
