Flint Pebbles

This is a gallery dedicated to the unexpected magic of the humble pebble. These are no rare and hyper-complex agates, but does that mean we should just pass them over? I think not and I hope this gallery bears me out there. I believe that beauty has no connection to rarity or the elite collectors market! For a while now, I have been picking these up in various places around London and the south-east and have managed to polish some as half-specimens.

Classifying these is massively problematic for two reasons. One is that the sea and the Thames obviously do a lot of moving around, but the other reason is that there has undoubtedly been considerable man-made interference, including imported/dredged material for sea defenses, fill, landscaping - even gravel paths and such like. As an example, in Lydd the pale flints were joined by a type of black flint - almost bluish when waterworn. These looked more out of place - man-made banks. So maybe the pale form is is the original english channel material? Conversely, on Whitstable beach, which I know to have been built up many years ago with a huge import of gravel, these paler forms predominate. And finally Samphire Hoe was the dumping ground for Channel Tunnel spoil, which gives yet another intriguing possibility. A Channel Tunnel geode? Probably fanciful, given that it could so easily have come out of the cliffs somewhere around kent, but I can dream!

At the very least though, one can see the immense variety of these stones.