Spotted Dick?

No thanks!

Something strange happened around noon today, the sky turned blue, the sun shone and it almost felt warm - for at least half an hour. Unfortunately I didn't have my camera with me.

I was rather uninspired with any shots taken this afternoon while pottering in the woods at the back of the cottage, until I found this.

It's a large lump of Hertfordshire Pudding Stone.

This area has a lot of pudding stone, great lumps of it up to a foot thick, and smaller pieces that I cannot resist gathering and using to edge paths in the garden.

Pudding stone is a conglomerate of rounded flint pebbles, such as all those on Brighton Beach which have been embedded in a silica (sand like) matrix that has subsequently hardened.

It is really like a giant nut brittle and breaks into chunks in the same way - straight across the flint pebbles. It is named pudding stone as the pebbles supposedly look like plums in plum pudding!

Hertfordshire pudding stone is not usually found in the place in which it formed, as much was broken up and moved by the melt waters of the last ice-age.

The colours of the matrix and pebbles vary considerably. I rather like the pinky hues and sparkle of the silica in this piece.

The above is a 'Hugankiss' version of a rather more complex series of geological events that you may wish to read about here

It's pub quiz night, so I'll catch you later. x