Stones

Mid-winter solstice, 2007

By local understanding and common consent, the stone that gave its name to the Anglo Saxon settlement of Chediston is situated alongside the parish boundary, across a ditch in a private woodland to the north of Chediston Hall. The stone, or stones, for it consists of a concentration of several scattered rocks, is a conglomerate. Conglomerate is a 'sack name' for rocks that consist of rounded to subrounded fragments such as pebbles, cobbles and boulders, which are usually referred to as clasts, surrounded by a finer grained stratified matrix (e.g., sandstone). Chediston's rocks vary in the size and nature of the clasts, which in the smaller pieces project from the edges. In those pieces with few clasts it can be seen that the fine grained matrix is clearly stratified. The whole assembly gives the impression of once being part of a larger whole that has been deliberately fragmented.

Conglomerates are fossilised gravels from primeval river beds or sea shores. Superficially, their substance resembles concrete, but it is entirely natural, comprised of rounded and smoothed pebbles bound with a younger matrix of silica quartz. It is commonly known as 'pudding stone' a name derived from a resemblance to Christmas pudding. Both the clasts and matrices of many conglomerates consist of relatively resistant rocks and/or minerals such as quartzite and quartz. Chunks of pudding stone carried by the Anglian Ice Sheet were deposited in Suffolk and Essex as it melted about half a million years ago.

The first reference to the Chediston Hall stone was Englehart ( ref, below) in 1878. Then it was a pinnacle about ten feet high by eight by six in a 'pit'. There is also a photograph of two Edwardian ladies reclining at the foot of the stone in 1913. It was recorded as a substantial mass in the 1930s (see references below), and we are left with the conclusion that sometime during the last seventy years it was almost entirely quarried away for building or road-making, leaving just a few, but substantial, remains in Chediston Wood.

In summary, and taking into account the following references, three suggestions have been made as how and when the the Chediston stone originated.

• It was deposited at the time of the Anglian Glaciation, at the spot where its remains are now to be found, as a substantial glacial erratic. The Cookley 'Rockstone', now in the garden of Rockstone Lodge across the valley, was deposited at the same time and was revealed by 13th century excavations in a gravel pit belonging to Rockstone Manor.
• It is all that remains of a former covering of High Suffolk with Westleton Bed Gravel, most of which has been eroded away.
• It was constructed as a folly by one of the owners of Chediston Hall (when the estate was beautified in the early 19th century), using material taken from the Cookley Rockstone.
• The second suggestion does not fit the accepted facts of the Anglian Glaciation.
• The last suggestion does not fit the names of the community, which is described in Domesday as Cedestan, Cidestan and Cidestanes (stan= stone). In other words, it is very likely that Chediston has had its own stone from time immemorial. On the other hand the two stones appear to have come from the same conglomerate strata. The natural explanation is that they were scraped off some northern outcrop and carried south to be dropped within a mile of each other when the glacier melted.

The present situation is that RIGS (The association that encourages the appreciation, conservation and promotion of Regionally Important Geological and Geomorphological Sites for education and public benefit') has been made aware of the above concerns. Officers from RIGS have agreed to visit the two sites during 2008 and report back to the 'Blything' team.

Cookley Stone (Rockstone Manor)

Photographs taken by Ruth Downing: December, 2007

By courtesy of Mr C Whistlecraft of Rockstone Lodge

Garden of Rockstone Lodge (old shallow gravel pit?)

Chediston Stone

'Morainic Stone' in Chediston Hall Woods 1913

photograph by courtesy of Mrs J. Aldous of Chediston Hall.

People in the photo are Miss Margery Upcher, daughter of the Rector of Chediston and Miss Helen de Lacroix whose mother was Helen Groom. In the 1891 Census for Chediston, the de Lacroix family were resident in The Grange.

The 'stone' comprises at least three types of rock. The one in the middle is clearly 'pudding stone'. Above it is a more finely grained sedimentary rock. Both seem to have been heavily eroded. Were they eroded before or after the glacial episode?

The bottom layer could have been hollowed out deliberately, to produce the shallow grotto in which the lady on the left is partially lying.

On the other hand it may be that the whole structure was assembled from separate stones by human effort. Francis Englehart considered this structure, which he saw in the 1930s, to be a 'cairn erected as a folly, from loose portions of the perfectly natural Chedistone in Rockstone Lane' (actually in Cookley).

Regarding the question as to whether the structure in the photograph is a natural stratified formation that was broken away from the bed rock by a glacier moving south, requires identifying a northern conglomerate rock formation which shows the types as contiguous horizons. One such possible starting point to solve this puzzle is the Devonian Conglomerate south of the Belhelvie Fault in Scotland, which is tabulated below.

Type: Conglomerate (Devonian)

Strata: Sedimentary strata of the Lower Old Red Sandstone Group

Composition: Conglomerate, with subsidiary horizons of sandstone and clay

Site: Area south of the Belhelvie fault

A RELIC OF THE GLACIAL SANDS

by William Fowler, Hon. Secretary of Beccles Historical Society (date unknown)

Many of the large boulders that I have been cataloguing for several years in the Eastern parts of Suffolk and Norfolk are erratics left by glaciers during the Ice Age; and a few of them were recorded so long ago, as already occupying their present sites, that they have now become historix. In some of the thicker beds of Glacial Drift worked for brick-making new boulders are unearthed; these cannot be historic, nor are they allowed the opportunity of standing for such honour; most usually they are pounced upon and transported to complete a positively sweet corner of as Highbury Villas rock-gardens. Even stones of long local antiquity have been removed from our neighbour's landmark in this manner and all subsequent trace obliterated. It is not to my purpose to detail such erreatics wanderings, but simply relate the discovery of a new specimen in Chediston nearly two miles- to the north west of Halesworth church.

In Halesworth I happened to be chatting about the great sandstone block in Rockstone Lane -some two miles west of the town, when I was told of a much larger relic standing in the midst of a wood hardby. My informant was sped away in my car to a house on the brow of a hill overlooking the delightful valley - of the nameless tributary of the River Blyth that rises at Poplar Farm, in Linstead Parva. Thence my guide took me through park and gardens, to the wood beyond where we found the object of our journey after some search. Despite mature years, I must own to a thrill of no common, pleasure when I beheld the most interesting pylon extant throughout East Anglia. " Surely a heap of stones, piled together: probably a cairn reared above some old warrior's grave," I said. But upon further examination -I believed it to be one huge block around which the element's alone had battled for many a thousand years; and to some purpose, for erosion had taken such toll that in several places one could see through the mist, its softer parts had begin the first to go and left only the harder cores standing like plinths and pedestals to form a rough pillar, still rising nine feet in height and covering an area six and thirty feet in circumference.

One block is the more interesting geologically from the paucity of this indurated stratum's exposure as far east as Chediston; and further because the small and subcircular black pebbles so characteristic of the Westleton gravels, are more or less a relic.

And it was, most fascinating to reconstruct the past, and note the changes since the glacial beds were laid: to see the different horizon when these sands not only filled the valley at our feet but overtopped, probably to some height the stone here photographed.: to ponder the causes of its gradual cementation, and realize that at its deposition no valley existed at all: and then to visualise the great processes by which nature had erased so ponderable an amount of materials to form the gravels and stones now passing ,through Blythburgh to Westleton Heath. The indurate cracks of which our block of saccharoidal sandstone bears witness, were doubtless laid down long before historic times began; and they are, I believe, rather rarely found eastward of Stowmarket. Just as the Sarsen Stones or grey-wethers lie scattered over 'Salisbury Plain to remind us of the time when those chalky downs were clothed with sandstone caps, so we in Suffolk are reminded of a great transformation by the denudation that has left us the present landscape.

ADDITIONAL NOTE BY FRANCIS ENGLEHART, M.A. F.G.S.

The surface soil all round the Chediston Hall Rock is chalky Jurassic Boulder -clay. The Rock itself consists of several boulders, cleverly cemented together, and of precisely the same formation as the celebrated Rockstone in the adjacent valley. This is referred to in the Geological Survey of Co 1887 as a 'pinnacle, left standing' about ten feet high by eight by six in the present pit (where it now lies prone and considerably diminished in size), when the Glacial Sands were dug away from around it. For it belongs to the Westleton Pebble-bed, coeval although a good deal harder than those sands. I consider it most probable that the Hall cairn was erected as a folly, from loose portions of the perfectly natural Chedistone in Rockstone Lane, and now nine and a half feet long by about six and a half both ways.

Suffolk erratics are from many strata. Mammilated Sarsen Stone from the (Lower Eocene) Reading beds is rare in the north; but it occurs in frequent blocks through the Stour valley in the south. One such block similar to the smaller monoliths of Stonehenge, was found last March by Mr Englehart and is among farm buildings of Ramshalt Lodge. Our largest block is at Hartest Green. Ed.

Chediston Stones 2007 (actually in Wissett