Not sure what the rock is, but it looks igneous. The erratic is quite literally falling to pieces -- as crossing joints or fractures open up probably as a result of frost-related processes every winter.
Saturday, 8 April 2023
A giant erratic in Massachusetts
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3 comments:
What a pity it's in Andover, Massachusetts, and not Andover, Hampshire just down the road from Amesbury and you - know - where......
Been thinking, lately, how many of Stonehenge's bluestones are chips off the same block. If there was an erratic, much like this, which split into many blocks, later to be carved into pillars. I'll bet that so many of the remaining bluestone pillars are brothers and sisters.
I wonder what a very large erratic off of one of the Preseli Tors would look like—to Mesolithic peoples. Rather, what a whopper, like in this picture, would mean to them, stuck, in the Salisbury Plain. What stories would develop around it? For it then, maybe 1,000s of years later, to be dragged away, in bits, to be erected in a circular ditch. And if those old stories would still be attached to the parts.
Stories last hundreds, thousands of years. Near me, there is the story of the Tittersone Clee giants and the shaft of an arrow—an eight foot slab of stone. Erratics call out for story explanations : -)
Well, I wouldn't like to speculate as to a giant erratic like this being dumped on Salisbury Plain. But I agree with Olwen Williams-Thorpe and her colleagues that the only quarry associated with Stonehenge was Stonehenge itself -- used as an axe factory and as a source for smaller lumps of stone . The sheer variety of rock types points to multiple sources, not one or two gigantic ones...... and of course the great majority of the bluestones at Stonehenge are unmodified glacial erratics, heavily abraded and weathered.
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