Your ancient Kent relatives

[Oliver Buckle]

Looks like the footprints have been found in the sandstone which is next to the chalk. The article is on the national news as I type.

The chalk is a soft limestone, not quite hard enough to build with, but does have some fossils in it. I've found oysters and sea urchins and sometimes pyrites nodules that have replaced organic materials.

The news article showed a 3 toed footprint that they found while filming View attachment 82009

The fact that surprised me about chalk was that there are prehistoric mines in the chalk digging for flints. That made me wonder what flint is, the chalk is fossil material. It turns out the flints are fossilized jellyfish of a silica base, There must have been thousands of them.

Ps. I once took down the peg tiles from an old farmhouse to remove a swarm of bees that had got behind it. Putting it back was a hell of a job as the stringers the tiles were hung on had warped out of shape and the tiles were hand made with peg holes at various heights. I had to make up a batch of lime mortar to bed the pegs into and sort out tiles that fitted each stringer, it was like doing a huge vertical jigsaw on a ladder with almost identical pieces. The hardest work of any swarm I ever took.

 

[Marck]

Up the hill from Dunster Castle is an ancient Iron Age fort called Bat's Castle. It is speculated to be a legendary castle, Din Draithou, built by an equally legendary Irish King, Crimthann mac Fidaig. I find old places and things, at the edge of myth and history, to be fascinating.

What really surprised me is that the fort wasn't discovered until 1983, when some local boys found some ancient silver coins. It looks somewhat prominent now by aerial view, but it must have been more hidden back in the 1980s. Perhaps the boys gave it the name Bat's Castle. I don't think there is even a cavity there to house any number of bats.

 

[DirtMechanic]

I found out the chalk that underlies our local black belt is impermeable to water. Thus the politicians have sold it to the world as a very good dumping ground for toxic waste. I wonder if I benefit from all those dumping fees?