Sandy Bay (Devon)

View of the Sandy Bay east to Straight Point.

The Sandy Bay is a mile- wide bay near Exmouth, in the county of Devon, on the Channel coast of England.

Location

Sandy Bay is located about sixteen kilometers south of the city of Exeter, four kilometers south-east of Exmouth and about eleven kilometers southwest of Sidmouth.

The western end of the bay are the rocks of Orcombe Point. In the east it is bounded by the headland Straight Point, which is used by the Royal Marines as a shooting range. Further east, close to the small bays Otter Cove and Littleham Cove and pebble beach of Budleigh Salterton.

Sandy Bay is a popular swimming spot on the cliffs of Devon and located close to the beach a great holiday site.

Geology

The cliffs of the English Channel in East Devon and Dorset is one of the natural wonders of the world. From Orcombe Point to Old Harry Rocks extends a 155 km long coastline, which has been declared as the first landscape in England by UNESCO as a World Heritage Site. The cliffs of Sandy Bay is part of this so-called Jurassic Coast. The depositional area, who recorded the sedimentary series of the Jurassic Coast at the time, is the so-called Wessex Basin.

The rock strata of the Jurassic Coast are tilted slightly to the east. The geologically oldest rocks are therefore located in the westernmost section of this Küstengeotops. To the east, the median age of the rocks decreases gradually. The natural outcrops along the coast form a substantially continuous sequence, ranging from the Triassic deposits, on the Jurassic to those of the Cretaceous geological period and represents a total of about 185 million years ago.

Orcombe Point, located at the west end of Sandy Bay, is the starting point for the "walk through time", the march through time along the Jurassic Coast. Therefore, it is here in the geologically oldest part of the World Natural Heritage.

The red rocks on the cliffs of Sandy Bay consist mainly of reddish brown silty mudstones of the " Exmouth Mudstone and Sandstone Formation " ( roughly translatable as " Exmouth clay and sandstone formation "). This lithostratigraphic unit belongs in turn to the " Aylesbeare Mudstone Group" ( " Alyesbeare - mudstone - group "). The mudstones were in the Late Permian and / or deposited in the early Triassic in semi-arid to semi-humid climatic conditions in a flood plain. This is the Exmouth lineup also their age and petrography closely related to some significant Permian and Triassic sedimentary series in Central Europe, for example, both in terms of its emergence as with the Tambach formation of the Thuringian Forest, or the widespread in Germany sandstone.

The sequence in the cliff of Sandy Bay is part of the type - profile of the Exmouth lineup.

In a stormy sea color the clay particles that are washed by the waves from the cliff, the sea water in this part of the coast red. The coarser eroded sediment particles, so the sand, sit relatively close to the cliff now and have formed a beach that slopes towards the sea so shallow that it is connected at low tide on Orcombe Point out to the beach of Exmouth.