Flint Pebbles

This is a gallery dedicated to the unexpected magic of the humble flint pebble. These are no rare and hyper-complex agates, but does that mean we should just pass them over? I think not and I hope this gallery bears me out there. I believe that beauty has no connection to rarity or the elite collectors market! For a long time now, I have been picking these up in various places around London and the south-east. Some have been cut and polished to show the interior, while others are more about wild fossil structures and fantastic shapes, and are thus left unworked.

Classifying these in any detail is massively problematic because the sea, the Thames and changes to the land obviously do a lot of moving around. Pretty much the entire south-east UK, from East Anglia to Dorset will have seen a lot of interchange, with stones constantly on the move. So any given pebble could have originated just about anywhere! However, there are places where things are going on on a more local scale, such as the dark flints weathering out of the cliffs near Bishopstone or the areas close to or under the chalk cliffs where much 'fresher' specimens can be found. However, beyond even that, there has undoubtedly been considerable man-made interference, including imported/dredged material for sea defenses, fill, landscaping - even gravel paths and such like. As an example, I know that Whitstable beach has been built up many years ago with a huge import of gravel. And Samphire Hoe was a land reclamation project involving the Channel Tunnel spoil, which gives yet another intriguing possibility. A Channel Tunnel geode? Probably fanciful, given that it could so easily have come out of the cliffs somewhere around kent, but I can dream!

So don't pay too much attention to most of the classifications below - in general, they are just the vague area in which I happened to pick them up.