The climate of the Earth has undergone many changes and for those times when geologic data are widespread and abundant the Mesozoic appears to have been one of the warmest intervals. This was a time during which the single continent Pangea disintegrated into continental units similar to those of today, a time when there were no significant polar ice caps and sea level was generally much higher than at the present time, and a time when dinosaurs apparently dominated terrestrial faunas and the flowering plants evolved. Understanding this alien world, ancestral to ours, is intrinsically interesting, intellectually challenging, and offers opportunities for more effective targeting of sites where commercially important geological resources may be found. It also provides critical insights into the operation of coupled Earth systems (biospheric, atmospheric, hydrospheric and geospheric) under extreme 'greenhouse' conditions, and therefore may have relevance to possible future global change. Our intention in organizing this Discussion Meeting was to bring together those who gather and interpret geologic data with those who model global climates from first principles. The community of workers who study the Quaternary have made significant advances by integrating and comparing palaeodata and climate model experiments. Although we have focused not on the Quaternary 'icehouse' but on the Mesozoic 'hothouse' climate we are well aware that approaches used in the study of the Quaternary may have relevance to earlier times.

In many countries, saltmarshes represent a diminishing resource that threatens both natural changes and human activities. Suggestions that the rate of sea-level rise may accelerate, combined with a possible increase in mid-latitude storms, have raised concerns that the rate of saltmarsh loss may also accelerate, and that existing sea defences may be placed under even greater pressure. Saltmarshes are of increasing interest to a wide range of environmental scientists, engineers, conservationists, and planners concerned with coastal zone management. They are especially keen to understand the basic physical and biological processes which govern the formation and development of saltmarshes. Coastal engineers need to predict the likely effects on adjacent saltmarshes of abandoned or set-back of sea walls, and the impact of development schemes such as tidal barrages and marinas. Seven leading scientists present an overview of the most important questions including geomorphology, ecology, conservation and engineering significance.

The climate of the Earth has undergone many changes and for those times when geologic data are widespread and abundant the Mesozoic appears to have been one of the warmest intervals. This was a time during which the single continent Pangea disintegrated into continental units similar to those of today, a time when there were no significant polar ice caps and sea level was generally much higher than at the present time, and a time when dinosaurs apparently dominated terrestrial faunas and the flowering plants evolved. Understanding this alien world, ancestral to ours, is intrinsically interesting, intellectually challenging, and offers opportunities for more effective targeting of sites where commercially important geological resources may be found. It also provides critical insights into the operation of coupled Earth systems (biospheric, atmospheric, hydrospheric and geospheric) under extreme 'greenhouse' conditions, and therefore may have relevance to possible future global change. Our intention in organizing this Discussion Meeting was to bring together those who gather and interpret geologic data with those who model global climates from first principles. The community of workers who study the Quaternary have made significant advances by integrating and comparing palaeodata and climate model experiments. Although we have focused not on the Quaternary 'icehouse' but on the Mesozoic 'hothouse' climate we are well aware that approaches used in the study of the Quaternary may have relevance to earlier times.

A detailed study of the masonry defences of one England's most important Roman sites. Erected in c. 270 AD, the masonry walls of the Roman town of Silchester (Calleva Atrebatum; Hampshire, S. England) are part of the third system in a series of defensive works. They stand today to a height of almost 5m and are composed of up to seven lifts or stages, each consisting of a flint core and facing (now almost completely robbed away), capped by a string-course of large blocks and slabs that stretches across the full width (c. 3m) of the walls, formed of a wide variety of rock-types foreign to the district.

Between 1801 and the First World War the population of the Borough of Reading increased almost tenfold, simultaneously with the growth of new industries. The authorities responded by delineating new streets and encouraging development in districts springing up mainly to the east, south and west beyond the original market town. The Borough's Highways Committee, helped by legislation, played a major role in managing and guiding these activities, especially in the later part of the nineteenth century. Large number of bricks burnt from local clays were used to build houses, shops, schools, chapels and churches required in these new suburbs, but the making of the streets called for the procurement of stone from far and wide. This volume discusses the geological features, spatial distribution and geographic sources (such as south Oxfordshire, Wales, Leicestershire and as far away as Norway) of the types of stone used for road construction in Reading in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

The five-hundred year occupation of Insula IX at Silchester has yielded a sequence of 87 whetstones, mostly tabular but some bar- or rod-shaped. These are described, illustrated and characterized with the help of thin-section microscopic petrography. The whetstones originated in many geological sources, not all of which can at present be identified. Whetstones from the earliest levels at Silchester are comparatively local in origin (sarsen, ironstone) or were made from discarded, imported milling stones (Quartz Conglomerate, Upper Old Red Sandstone). During the first and second centuries AD substantial number of bar-shaped whetstones manufactured in the Wroxeter manner from sandstones in the Weald Clay Formation (earliest Cretaceous) were imported into Silchester. Almost all the whetstones of the later Roman period are secondary in character produced from discarded roofing tiles of Brownstones (Lower Old Red Sandstone) and Pennant sandstone (later Upper Carboniferous) imported from the West Country. Small numbers of whetstones can be traced to the Portland Group (Upper Jurassic) and to the Lower and Upper Greensand Groups (Lower Cretaceous). The provision of sharpening stones to Silchester as a whole is estimated to run into many thousands.

The Anglican church of St. Saviour's and its former parsonage, in the historic Hampshire parish of Mortimer West End, lie on the northern shoulder of the valley of the eastward-draining West End Brook that dissects an extensive plateau underlain by the Pleistocene Silchester Gravel and the Bagshot and London Clay Formations (early Tertiary). The sponsor (and effectively the builder) was Richard Fellowes Benyon of Englefield House, Englefield in Berkshire, who had in 1854 inherited the Englefield Estate on the death of his uncle. Designed by the London architect Richard Armstrong Snr, the church and parsonage were erected over a 20-month period in 1855-6, at a total cost of 3013, of which 473 represents various materials, goods and services provided directly by the Englefield Estate. There is seating for a mere 80 or so people, making it one of the most costly churches in the region."

Hampshire (southern England) north of roughly the latitude of Winchester is dominated geologically by the Upper Cretaceous Chalk Group and by a substantial outcrop of Tertiary clays and sands which, forming part of the London Basin, the county shares with Berkshire to the north. More than 115 churches, by in excess of 60 designers and architects, were rebuilt, built anew and/or significantly modified in this area between 1750 and the First World War in response to profound changes in population, sources of wealth and means of transport and communication. This work looks at their building materials and decoration.

The late 1860s saw church building on a large and unprecedented scale in Victorian England, one example of which was the parish church which forms the basis of this study. Contemporary documentation relating to the construction of the church has survived in remarkable fullness allowing J.R.L. Allen to present an extremely detailed reconstruction of the materials and equipment used, the funding of the project, the identity of the workmen, specialist masons and architect involved and their pay and conditions as well as the provisions made by the local population to accomodate the construction process.

This volume examines the building materials used in around 200 Berkshire churches dating from Georgian Gothic and Classical revivals of the turn of the nineteenth century to the Victorian Gothic rival and the years leading up the the First World War. The origins of the building materials are also discussed, and combined with documentary evidence, are used to provide conclusions about changing transportation and building costs.