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Much of the east of Nottingham lies on sedimentary rocks from the middle and upper Triassic, about 200 million years ago.  These are the Mercia mudstones, quite different from the Nottingham castle sandstone which underlies them.  

The border lies, very roughly, along the Mansfield road.  

They are economically important both a sources of clay for brick making and because they are impermeable to oil and gas.  The underlying Sherwood (Nottingham castle) sandstone is permeable to both and lies on top of the main carboniferous coal measures.  If pressure and heat have converted this to oil or gas, it seeped up through the Sherwood sandstone and occasionally gets caught under a convenient dome of mudstone.  This is the source of the East Midlands oil and gas fields.   

Three distinct layers of mudstone outcrop.  

The oldest and deepest is the Sneinton formation, a 10-20 metre thick reddish brown layer of interbedded sandstone, siltstone and mudstone.

It can be seen by drivers on the A60 cutting at Redhill (click here).   

However access to the cliff base is not possible from here because the Nottingham/Newark railway line runs at the foot of the cliffs.  To reach them it is necessary to walk down through the woods from Colwick Hill.   The path begins beside the bowling green, opposite Jesse Boot school, on Greenwood Road.  

My understanding is that the lower 7 metres or so of exposed rock are the Sneinton formation and the upper couple of metres the Radcliffe formation (see below)

The next layer upwards is the Radcliffe formation, a 10 metre thick layer of pinkish red or green mudstone, thinly interlaminated with pale grey, fine grained sandstone.  

On top of that is the Gunthorpe formation a 40 metre thick layer of red-brown mudstone with indurated beds of green dolomitic siltstone. 

The Gunthorpe formation is (semi-)naturally exposed at Stoke and Gunthorpe weirs on the Trent.  Click here. 

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Last modified: November 12, 2006