Newton St Loe SSSI is a geological Site of Special Scientific Interest

Site of Special Scientific Interest

A Site of Special Scientific Interest is a conservation designation denoting a protected area in the United Kingdom. SSSIs are the basic building block of site-based nature conservation legislation and most other legal nature/geological conservation designations in Great Britain are based upon...

 (SSSI) close to the River Avon

River Avon, Bristol

The River Avon is an English river in the south west of the country. To distinguish it from a number of other River Avons in Britain, this river is often also known as the Lower Avon or Bristol Avon...

, near the village of Newton St Loe in Bath and North East Somerset

Bath and North East Somerset

Bath and North East Somerset is a unitary authority that was created on 1 April 1996 following the abolition of the County of Avon. It is part of the Ceremonial county of Somerset...

. It was notified on September 1992.

It is 2.26 hectare

Hectare

The hectare is a metric unit of area defined as 10,000 square metres , and primarily used in the measurement of land. In 1795, when the metric system was introduced, the are was defined as being 100 square metres and the hectare was thus 100 ares or 1/100 km2...

s in size.

The site was featured in the Geological Conservation Review

Geological Conservation Review

The Geological Conservation Review is produced by the UK's Joint Nature Conservation Committee and is designed to identify those sites of national and international importance needed to show all the key scientific elements of the geological and geomorphological features of Britain...

.

The site is designated as an SSSI because it represents the only remaining known exposure of fossiliferous Pleistocene

Pleistocene

The Pleistocene is the epoch from 2,588,000 to 11,700 years BP that spans the world's recent period of repeated glaciations. The name pleistocene is derived from the Greek and ....

 gravels along the River Avon. In conjunction with other sites within the wider area, it has aided the development of a scientific understanding of the history of early glaciation within South West England

South West England

South West England is one of the regions of England defined by the Government of the United Kingdom for statistical and other purposes. It is the largest such region in area, covering and comprising Bristol, Gloucestershire, Somerset, Dorset, Wiltshire, Devon, Cornwall and the Isles of Scilly. ...

.

Site description

The citation sheet for this SSSI describes the site as follows:

This site consists of a river terrace approximately 10m above the present River Avon. The Pleistocene fluvial gravels temporarily exposed at Newton St Loe exhibit scour-and-fill structures. The trough cross bedding is consistent with the gravels having been laid down by a braided river, a fluvial style usually associated with cold stage sedimentation. The provenance of there gravels is complex and they contain material from South Wales and Midland sources. The gravels were subsequently weathered and decalcified during interstadial episodes and cryoturbated under stadial conditions.

Reasons for notification

The bodies of mammoth

Mammoth

A mammoth is any species of the extinct genus Mammuthus. These proboscideans are members of Elephantidae, the family of elephants and mammoths, and close relatives of modern elephants. They were often equipped with long curved tusks and, in northern species, a covering of long hair...

s (Mammuthus) and horse

Horse

The horse is one of two extant subspecies of Equus ferus, or the wild horse. It is a single-hooved mammal belonging to the taxonomic family Equidae. The horse has evolved over the past 45 to 55 million years from a small multi-toed creature into the large, single-toed animal of today...

s (Equus) have been found at the site. It was not possible to identify the species however, due to the poor state of the specimens.

Source

• English Nature citation sheet for this SSSI (accessed on 2006-07-07)