Lesnes Abbey Flints

Near Lesnes Abbey in the south-east London area, in the woods on the hill, is a famous fossil bed, where you can sift the sandy soil for shark's teeth, fossil bones and others. As you labour away at that, you will have to deal with a huge number of old flint pebbles as well, probably annoying a very large number of fossil hunters over the years. I remember having to pick out anything up to around 20 of them per load in my geological sieve. They are obviously sea pebbles, just as the shark's teeth were deposited on the seabed some 54 million years ago. All are fairly small, as if sorted by ancient currents to some degree. They are also relatively flawed.

Me of course, being mildly obsessed with flint pebbles, I had to take a few of them home with me alongside the shark's teeth - and here they are. They proved exceptionally colourful, with some vivid yellows alongside the actually quite familiar red. Not all of them were this colourful, but a strikingly high percentage were. Maybe these