Straight Point

Geographical location

Straight Point is a headland on the Channel coast near Exmouth, Devon in southwest England.

Location

Straight Point is located about sixteen kilometers south of the city of Exeter, four kilometers south-east of Exmouth and about eleven kilometers southwest of Sidmouth. West of Straightpoint extends the Sandy Bay, at the western end Orcombe Point is. Is the small bay Otter Cove and a little further east is the village of Budleigh Salterton on the East side of Straight Point.

The headland Straightpoint is used by the Marines as a shooting range.

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. Straight Point is part of this so-called Jurassic Coast.

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. The depositional area, who recorded the sedimentary series of the Jurassic Coast at the time, is the so-called Wessex Basin.

Orcombe Point forms the starting point for the "walk through time", the march through time along the Jurassic Coast and Straightpoint is just a few kilometers to the east. Therefore, it is here still in the geologically oldest part of the Jurassic Coast.

The red rocks on the cliff at Straight Point consist of layers which are lithostratigraphically as " Exmouth Mudstone and Sandstone Formation " means ( roughly translatable as " Exmouth clay and sandstone formation " ), and in turn to " Aylesbeare Mudstone group "( " Alyesbeare - mudstone group ") include. The Exmouth lineup red-brown silty mudstone is generally made, in which lenses are turned from red-brown sandstone that were deposited in the Late Permian and / or in the early Triassic in a flood plain under semi-arid to semi-humid climatic conditions. 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 Straight Point is part of the type - profile of the Exmouth lineup.

In Straightpoint the proportion of sandstones in the sequence of Exmouth lineup is particularly high. The fact that these sandstones of the abrasive action of waves and surf can better withstand than the mudstones, which make up the cliffs to the west and east of Straight Point prevalent, is ultimately the cause that this headland at all could arise. Due to the relatively high erosion resistance of these sandstones on the south and east sides of Straightpoint also a narrow surf platform has trained just over the Ebbniveau.