A Relic of the Glacial Sands

A RELIC

OF T H E GLACIAL

11

SANDS.

A RELIC OF THE GLACIAL SANDS.

BY W I L L I A M

FOWLER,

Hon. See. Beecks Hist.

Soe.

of the large boulders, that I have been cataloguing for several years in the eastern parts of Suffolk and Norfolk, are erratics left by glaciers during the Ice Age ; and a few of them were recorded so long ago, as already occupying their present sites, that they have now become historic. In some of the thicker beds of Glacial Drift, worked for brick-making, new boulders are unearthed ; these cannot be historic, nor are they allowed the opportunity of standing for such honour ; most usually they are pounced upon and transported to complete a positively sweet corner by Highbury Villa's rock-gardenist!

Even stones of long local antiquity have been removed from our neighbour's landmark in this manner, and all subsequent trace obliterated. It is not my purpose to detail such erratics' wanderings ; but to simply relate the discovery of a new speeimen in Chediston, nearly two miles to the north-west of Haiesworth church.

MANY

In Haiesworth I happened to be chatting about the great Sandstone block (Ceddes stan, the origin of AS. " Chediston ") in Rockstone Lane, some two miles west of the town, when I was told of a much larger relic standing in the midst of a wood hard by. My informant was sped away in my car to a house on the brow of a hill overlooking the delightful Valley of the nameless tributary of the Blyth that rises at Poplar-farm in Linstead Parva.

Thence my guide took me through park and gardens to the wood beyond, where we found the object of our journey after some search. Despite mature years, I must own to a thrill of no common pleasure when I beheld the most interesting pylon extant throughout East Anglia. " Surely a heap of stones, piled together : probably a cairn reared above some old warrior's grave," I said. But n o ; upon further examination I believed it to be one huge block around which the elements alone had battled for many a thousand years ; and to some purpose, for erosion had taken such toll that in several places one could see through the mass. Its softer parts had been the first to go and left only the harder cores, standing like plinths and pedestals to form a rough pillar, still rising nine feet in height and covering an area six-and-thirty feet in circumference.

Our block is the more interesting geologically from the paucity of this indurated stratum's exposure as far east as Chediston ; and further because the small and subcircular black pebbles, so characteristic of the Westleton gravels, are more or less a relic

A

R B U C

OP

THE

GLACIAL

SANDS.

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A RELIC OF THE GLACIAL SANDS.

of this deposit. In our specimen they are plainly visible, very hardly cemented together, between the shales and beds of sandstone proper.

Looking east, we seemed just level with the apex of Haiesworth church-tower, hence some hundred feet above the Valley. And it was most fascinating to reconstruct the past, and note the changes since the glacial beds were laid : to see the different horizon when these sands not onlyfilledthe valley at our feet but overtopped, probably to some height, the stone here photographed : to ponder the causes of its gradual cementation, and realize that at its deposition no valley existed at all: and then to visualize the great processes by which Nature had erosed so ponderable an amount of material to form the gravels and stones now passing through Blythburgh to Westleton heath. The indurate rocks,* of which our block of saccharoidal sandstone bears witness, were doubtless laid down long before historic times began ; and they are, I believe, rather rarely found eastward of Stowmarket. Just as the Sarsen Stones or grey-wethers lie scattered over Salisbury Piain to remind us of the time when those chalky downs were clothed with sandstone caps, so we in Suffolk are reminded of a great transformation by the denudation that has left us the present landscape.

ADDITIONAL NOTE, BY FRANCIS ENGLEHEART, M.A., F.G.S.

The surface soil all round the Chediston Hall Rock is chalkyJurassic Boulder-clay. The Rock itself consists of seviral boulders, cleverly cemented together, and of precisely the same formation as the celebrated Rockstone in the adjacent valley.

This is referred to in the Geological Survey of c. 1887 as a " pinnacle, left standing " ten feet high by eight by six in the present pit (where it now lies prone and considerably diminished in size), when the Glacial Sands were dug away from around it.

For it belongs to the Westleton Pebble-bed, coeval with though a good deal harder than those sands. I consider it most probable that the Hall cairn was erected, as a folly, from loose portions of the perfectly natural Chedistone in Rockstone Lane, now nine and a half feet long by about six and a half both ways. *Suffolk erratics are from many strata. Mammilated Sarsen Stone from the (Lower Eocene) Reading beds is rare in the north ; but it occurs in frequent blocks through the Stcur Valley in the south. One such block similar to the smaller monoliths of Stonehenge, was found last March by Mr. Engleheart and us among farm buildings of Ramsholt Lodge. Our largest block is at Härtest Green.—Ed.