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After drawing these gritstone boulders at the centre of the little plateau I walk over to them, to pace out their length. The rock on the left, which looks like a reclining Henry Moore figure, is 12 feet long and about 4 feet high. I pick up a broken piece of rock lying next to it as a hand specimen of what I've just been drawing. I realise after drawing it that there's something unusual about it; that striated surface on one side of it. I recover the other pieces and put it back together. It's about 5 or 6 inches square. Just the size to pick up in your hand.
Or is it a fragment from a slickenslide, where the rock has slid along a fault plane under pressure. I've since shown the specimen to Alison Quarterman, a geologist at Greenhead College, Huddersfield. She says that it's unlikely to be a fault plane because quartz crystals are soon re-melted by the friction generated in a fault and there's no sign of this here. So it's quern stone? Well, there is one other possibility; rock fragments in glaciers often carry striations like this, where they were rubbed along the bedrock under the ice. I shall have to ask an archaeologist to take a look at it. Any archaeologists out there please?
Richard Bell, richard@willowisland.co.uk |
Another
good day for drawing and I'm back at Carl Wark hill fort.
To cover up from the sun I'm wearing a hat with a brim, I've got my Buff
(headgear thing) covering my neck as a lightweight scarf, I've dabbed
sun screen on my nose and face and I wearing a loose long-sleeved shirt
to give myself some protection from the sun. This is such as novelty after
dressing to keep the cold out for so long!
Could
this have been a quern stone? Was it used for grinding corn on one of
the gritstone boulders, when this was an Iron Age fort, 2,000 years ago?