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Thursday, 15 May 2025

The joy of quartz


An old wall on Parrog, Newport, topped with heavily abraded quartz boulders


A new wall on the other side of the road, also topped with abraded boulders -- in this case probably recycled........

On one of our walks on the Parrog in Newport, the other day, I was reminded of the fact that people just love quartz boulders and cobbles. In and around Newport they are used all over the place, mostly as wall toppings.  They are for the most part not "fresh" and angular, with sharp edges, but rounded or sub-rounded.  They have been for the most part collected from either beaches in the vicinity ( to the west of Parrog) or from old glacial and fluvio-glacial deposits.  Before the days of effective field clearance, the ground surface was littered with quartz boulders...............   

These boulders have not been used for ritual or religious purposes, or even for the enhancement of status  -- they have been used simply because they are ornamental and nice to look at.  They have not been "fetched" from quartz quarries or sacred places.  It's all about aesthetics...............

This brings to mind our discussions on this blog about the famous (infamous) quartz "facade" at Newgrange, made of boulders and cobbles rescued from the spoil when the work of "restoration" was under way.  Whether or not there was originally a quartz facade, most authorities seem to accept that the white boulders (some with cream colouration, some greyish, and some reddish) were used simply to enhance the appearance of the mound.  As I have argued before, the argument that the boulders were quarried from 60 miles away, in the Wicklow Hills, has never been supported by convincing evidence.  It;s much more likely that the boulders were simply collected up in the local landscape around the Newgrange site.

http://www.carrowkeel.com/sites/boyne/newgrange2a.html




Work in progress on the Newgrange site.  A perfect quarry.  Whitish quartz boulders were picked out specifically for the purpose of creating the white facade.


4 comments:

Tony Hinchliffe said...

Unable to find any mention of quartz in my prehistory reference books. Here in Wiltshire we have examples of movement of oolitic limestone for the walls of West Kennet chambered tomb near Avebury. Aubrey Burl wrote that West Kennet's delicate dry-stone walling between the standing stones of its facade consisted of calcareous grit from 7 miles away, whilst its oolitic limestone was obtained from no closer than Frome 25 miles distant .

Tony Hinchliffe said...

Aubrey Burl went on to say "the limestone may have been regarded as magical or may have reminded the builders of the Cotswolds where dry-stone walling was common.......Its presence shows that contacts between Avebury and the Bristol [ does he mean Cotswolds??] area were strong." ( Prehistoric Avebury, 2002).

Tony Hinchliffe said...

Joshua Pollard, in Avebury: the Biography of a Landscape (2002) says of the use of the oolitic limestone that "its incorporation in these monuments served as a physical link between the [Avebury] region and far-off places. Oolitic limestone may have been chosen because of its aesthetic qualities, perhaps its whiteness, which was akin to that of bleached ancestral bone...." ( page 73 at seq).

Tony Hinchliffe said...

Pollard, in the aforementioned 2002 Avebury book, goes on to say of the use of oolitic limestone " perhaps it was even held to contain the essence of ancestral or spiritual beings, in the same way that QUARTZITE is believed to do so by aboriginal groups in Western Arnhem Land, Australia ( Tacon 1991) ". Then Pollard goes somewhat speculative, MPP on his reader: -"Could it be that this stone was perceived to come from an 'ancestral homeland', an area from which some of the first Neolithic communities came into the region? In which case its importation reinstated links between past and present, between different landscapes, and between spiritual and worldly realms. This is just speculation... " If I was commenting sceptically, I would point out that MPP and Pollard about 10 years investigated the Preseli Hills together, Rhosyfelin "quarry" included.