Cookley+stone

A RELIC OF THE GLACIAL SANDS by William Fowler, Hon. Secretary of Beccles Historical Society

Many of the large boulders that I have been cataloguing for several years in the Eastern parts of Suffolk and Norfo1k 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 historix. 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 oportunity of standing for such honour; most usually they are pounced upon and transported to complete a positively sweet corner of as Highbury Villas rock-gardens. Even stones of long local antiquity have been removed from our neighbour's landmark in this manner and all subsequent trace obliterated. 1t is not to my purpose to detail such erreatics wanderings, but simply relate the discovery of a new specimen in Chediston nearly two miles- to the north west of Halesworth church.

In Halesworth I happened to be chatting about the great sandstone block 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' hardby. 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 River 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 upon further examination -I believed it to be one huge block around which the element's 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 miss, its softer parts had begin 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.

One 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.

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 only filled the 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 visualise the great processes by which nature had erased so ponderable an amount of materials to form the gravels and stones now passing ,through Blythburgh to Westleton Heath. The indurate cracks 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 Plain 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 ENGLEHART, M.A. F.G.S.

The surface soil all round the Chediston Hall Rock is chalky Jurassic Boulder -clay. The Rock itself consists of several 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 Co 1887 as a 'pinnacle, left standing' a 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 although 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, and 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 Stour valley in the south. One such block similar to the smaller monoliths of Stonehenge, was found last March by Mr Englehart and is among farm buildings of Ramshalt Lodge. Our largest block is at Hartest Green. Ed.