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III.—On the Sarsen Stones of Berkshire and Wilts1
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 May 2009
Extract
Every one who has traversed our Chalk Downs must have noticed here and there shapeless masses of grey stones, half buried in the turf. Sometimes they are found in groups, like the shattered ruins of some ancient temple, and at other times they occur in isolated blocks, as though giant hands had hurled them at random over the hills in wanton sport. At one place, near the village of Kennet, they assume the appearance of a multitudinous flock of sheep, and are known by the appropriate designation of “Grey Wethers,” whilst at other places in the same vicinity they bristle on the hill-sides, and trail along the valleys like the débris of an avalanche or the moraine of a glacier. Nowhere do they exist in such profusion as on the west of Marlborough, but they are found scattered over the whole Chalk area of this district. At the western end of it they consist chiefly of saccharoid sandstone. Further east, especially around Newbury, they become smaller, harder, and more crystalline; whilst in the neighbourhood of Great Bedwyn, and occasionally elsewhere, they take the form of pudding-stone, being agglomerations of flint pebbles, cemented together in a matrix of siliceous sand.
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Footnotes
From the “Transactions of the Newbury District Field Club,” 1871. See Geol. Mag., No. 105, p. 117.
References
page 199 note 1 I am indebted to Prof. Phillips for this suggestion.
page 199 note 2 The word “Sar” occurs in the earliest copy of the poem of “Chevy Chase”—
“The dint it was both sad and sar That he of Montgomry sets; The swan feathers that his arrow bar With his hart-blood they were wet.”—Fit ii. v. 90.
In the preceding verse the word “ soar ” (sore) is used instead of “sar”:—
“A dynt that was both sad and soar.”
The Scotcň word “sair,” signifying great, as well as painful, best expresses the meaning of the Anglo-Saxon adjective “Sar.”—Note by Edit. N. D. F. C. Tr.
page 199 note 3 See Aubrey's “Nat. Hist, of Wiltshire,” p. 44.
page 199 note 4 “Abury,” p. 16.
page 200 note 1 Vol. viii., p. 442.
page 200 note 2 Quart. Journ. Geol. Soc., vol. x., p. 123.
page 201 note 1 Quart. Journ. Geol. Soc, vol. xviii., p. 271.
page 201 note 2 For figures and descriptions of some water-worn and rounded Sarsen stones from the neighbourhood of Southampton, see Geol. Mag., 1866, Vol. III. p. 296, Plate XIII.
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