Scientific Essays and Lectures

by Charles Kingsley

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.

But where did the sandstone come from? You may say, it “grew” of itself in our sands and gravels; but it certainly did not “grow” on the top of a bare chalk down. The Druids must have brought the stones thither, then, from neighbouring gravel-pits. They brought them, no doubt: but not from gravel-pits. The stones are found loose on the downs on the top of the bare chalk, in places where they plainly have not been put by man.

For instance, near Marlborough is a long valley in the chalk, which, for perhaps half a mile, is full of huge blocks of this sandstone, lying about on the turf. The “gray wethers” the shepherds call them. One look at them would show you that no man’s hand had put them there. They look like a river of stone, if I may so speak; as if some mighty flood had rolled them along down the valley, and there left them behind as it sunk.

Now, whence did they come?

Many answers have been given to that question. It was supposed by many learned men that they had been brought from the sandstone mountains of Wales, like the rolled pebbles of which I spoke just now. But the answer to that was, that these great stones are not rolled: they are all squarish, more or less; their edges are often sharp and fresh, instead of being polished almost into balls, as they would have been in rolling two hundred miles along a sea-bottom, before such a tremendous current as would have been needed to carry them.

Then rose a very clever guess. They must have been carried by icebergs, as much silt and stones (we know) has been carried, and have dropped, like them, to the bottom, when the icebergs melted.