PUTTENHAM, BUCKS.

When the coprolite diggings started in this parish is uncertain but the 1871 census apart from an “Engine Driver” who may have been tending the washmill there were two unmarried fossil diggers from Shepreth, Cambridgeshire, lodging in Astrope, 23 year old Frank Hopwood and 21 year old John Peters. (1871 census) This suggests a possible connection with Henry Wilkerson a Cambridgeshire coprolite contractor whose workmen were digging pits in nearby parishes of Cheddington, Billington and Slapton at this time. Whether he had a contract with a landowner here is unknown. He subsequently became the manager of Morris and Griffin’s many coprolite workings in the area and there is every likelihood they were responsible here, taking advantage of the easy access to the canal to transport the fossils to their Wolverhampton manure works. (Strahan, Flitt and Denham, ‘Mineral Resources,1915-19’, Mem.Geol.Surv.1919,p19; I.O’Dell, ‘A Vanished Industry,’ Beds.Mag.1951)

The only documentation of the workings came from a reference in a paper about the geology of the area in which it stated there were workings near the canal between Puttenham and Buckland. These were in operation between 1874 - 75 when the geologist, Jukes-Brown paid a visit. In his account he described the pit as varying in depth between ¸ and 10 feet with the seam of round black nodules being found in the greensand in about an 18 inches thick bed lying above the gault clay.

On the other side of the canal near Puttenham...the black phosphate nodules were never accumulated in the hollows. The foreman of the works fully appreciated this fact, which unfortunately was not to his advantage, since the deeper working in the hollows did not repay him by a more abundant harvest of nodules, as it would have done near Cambridge, where he told me, he had seen the coprolites accumulated to a depth of two feet in such places.”

(Jukes-Browne, ‘Cretaceous Rocks of Great Britain,’ Quart.Journ.Geol. Surv.xxxi,1875 pp256-7)

the United States.