They are flints; but very small, dark, often almost black, and quite
round and polished. Compare them with the average flints of the
pit, and you see that while the average flints are fresh from the
chalk, these have plainly been rolled and rounded for years. They
are (except in their dark colour) exactly such shingle as forms the
south-coast beach about Hastings and Brighton. They are the shingle
beaches of the Eocene sea, part of which are preserved under the
London clay. To the north a vast bed of them remains in its
original place, on Blackheath near London; while part, in the
district to the south, which the London clay has not covered, have
been washed away, and carried into our gravel-pit, to mingle with
other flints fresh from the chalk.
I said just now that I had proof that a great tract of the chalk-
hills which are now bare, was once covered with sand and gravel.
Here, in the presence of these dark pebbles, is a proof. But I have
another, and a yet more curious one.
For our gravel-pit, if it be, will possibly yield us another, and a
more curious object. You most of you have seen, I dare say, large
stones, several feet long, taken out of these pits. In the gravels
and sands at Pirbright they are so plentiful that they are quarried
for building-stone. And good building-stone they make; being
exceedingly hard, so that no weather will wear them away. They are
what is called saccharine (that is, sugary) sandstone. If you chip
off a bit, you find it exactly like fine whity-brown sugar, only
intensely hard. Now these stones have become very famous; for two
reasons. First, the old Druids used them to build their temples.
Second, it is a most puzzling question where they came from.
First. They were used to build Druid temples.
If you go to the further lodge of Dogmersfield Park, which opens
close to the Barley-mow Inn, you will see there several of them,
about five feet high each, set up on end. They run in a line
through the plantation past the lodge, along the park palings; one
or two are in an adjoining field. They are the remains of a double
line; an avenue of stones, which has formed part of an ancient
British temple.
I know no more than that: of that I am certain.
But if you go to the Chalk Downs of Wiltshire, you see these temples
in their true grandeur. You have all heard of Stonehenge on
Salisbury Plain. Some of you may have heard of the great Druid
temple at Abury in Wilts, which, were it not all but destroyed,
would be even grander than Stonehenge. These are made of this same
sugar-sandstone.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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