The beds were deposited in the Upper Silurian period, around 420 million years ago, in warm, equatorial waters frequently ravaged by storms, in front of an advancing shoreline.

[1] The beds consists of thin to very thick layers of a light grey, fine grained argillaceous sandstone, containing a small calcareous element.

Manten (1966) deduces that the Burgsvik beds were formed fairly close to the shoreline on a beach "faintly sloping towards the open sea", and that they were extensively reworked by the action of tides and storms.

Rare burrows, sometimes found in clay lenses, may have formed in quieter waters that were protected by low sand or reef barriers from wave action.

Contrary to Gray et al.'s (1974) tidal mud flat interpretation, Long surmises that it may represent locally emergent offshore bars, near-shore sands or beach deposits.

Mainly due to the inhomogeneous nature of shoreline deposits, lateral variation is intense throughout the Burgsvik beds, making correlation difficult (Laufeld 1974).

A lack of marine macrofossils in plant-rich beds suggests that large grazers or predators may have been absent, perhaps because water depths were so shallow - this may have aided fossil preservation (Gray et al. 1974).

[4] Martma et al. (2005) assign a Mid-Ludfordian (Upper Ludlow) age to the Burgsvik, which places the beds in close temporal proximity to the Lau event, a late Silurian mass extinction.