Beauty among the grey

When I took this, I was one of a group of people walking down into a uniformly grey quarry.  The ground was grey, and the quarry faces were grey. We were orange in our hi-vis.  There was a bank of clay waste alongside the track we were on, and in places the wildflowers brought very welcome colour to the scene.

#100Photos #40

Crinoids in the hall!!

In general, people don't really expect floors to be interesting but, just sometimes, you come across something like this.  Before I tell you about this stone, and the fossils in it, I'll tell you about the day I took this photo.

 

It was Sunday just gone, and for me it was a Red Letter Day.  I have a bucket list, and one of the items on it was to hear Mussorgsky's 'Pictures at an Exhibition' live.  If I could hear 'Night on the Bare Mountain' at the same performance, that would be a real bonus.  This Sunday, the Philharmonia Orchestra were performing both at the Royal Festival Hall on the South Bank, London, and Steven Isserlis was the soloist for Kabalevsky's Cello Concerto number 2 in addition.  The whole concert was a real treat and well worth the trip to London.

I'd got there early - a couple of hours early.  Deliberately.  That allowed for rail delays and gave me time to buy lunch (this was an afternoon performance).  It also gave me time to look at the floor - there is some refurbishment going on at the Hall at present, so there were was nobody milling around where I was admiring the said fossils and trying to get a decent photo of them with my mobile phone (it's a Samsung A23, if you're interested and you want to look up details of its cameras).  I was half-aware that there was somebody nearby, and he came over to ask me about the photos I was taking.  If you know me, you know that means I'm going to go into some detail with an equal amount of enthusiasm.  After he introduced himself, he asked to take my photo - he is a very talented portrait photographer, and I'm really looking forward to seeing the result.  He was shooting on actual film!  We then spent a good few minutes looking at the floor and in my case, trying to take a decent-ish photo of it.  I am pleased to say that Gavin, as I learned his name is, was as enthusiastic about the crinoids as I was, especially when I showed him a photo of an extant species.  I'd be interested to see the photos of them he took.  We swapped Instagram details so I no doubt will.

Coming back to the photo:  Quite apart from the fact that I'm a tad arthritic nowadays, taking a photo of a polished slab is a s*d because the camera tries to focus through the surface rather than on it, and also the surface is worn so that the edges of the fossils are no longer crisp and distinct when you really zoom in to them.

Having made my excuses for this photograph:

This is Derbydene Stone, a limestone from Cromford in Derbyshire (I didn't know that when I visited Cromford many years ago!). It is full of the stems and ossicles of crinoids (sea lilies).  These are animals in the same family  - echinoderms - as sea urchins and starfish.

What is a amazing about these crinoids, though, is their age.  They - and the stone they are preserved in - date back more than 330 million years to the Lower Carboniferous Period, long before the evolution of dinosaurs and mammals.  In fact, when T. rex was learning that that bright flash was really bad news, these animals had already been fossils for 264 million years. We're way closer in time to T. rex, at 66 million years, than T. rex was to these crinoids.

#100Photos #39

A rite of passage

 

Every summer, the Open University used to hold a residential course, SXR260 The geological history of the British Isles, based at Durham University. For a week’s study, you didn’t just need your everyday clothes; you needed your outdoor gear (not forgetting waterproofs!) and boots, camera, books, stationery, sunblock, hairdryer... you get the picture.  You tended to gain the odd hand specimen of rock to take home for your reference collection as well; not many, of course, but choice.  If you’re interested enough to be reading this, you have probably been on the same course or on a good few field trips so you know what I’m talking about in terms of luggage!

Durham Station did not have lifts.  At the end of my week (I was there in 2005), there I was, struggling to carry my case down the stairs.  I’m not tiny but the case was hefty.  Bang on cue, this chap and his girlfriend overtake me and said chap takes the chance to impress his girlfriend with his gallantry. “Can I help you with your case, love?”  “Yes, please,” said I in my most pathetic voice.

Chap picks up the case, which is clearly heavier than he expected. “What have you got in here, rocks?”  “Funny you should say that, I’ve just been doing a week’s geology...”  The look on his face clearly said that he couldn’t have made up that story if he tried.  I know I couldn’t have done, and I've often wondered whether he told the story in the pub that night.

One of the visits during the week had been to Shap Quarry, in Cumbria.  I had heard so much about Shap granite during the previous 18 months that it had assumed almost numinous status. Since then, I've seen polished slabs of it on walls and used as counter tops, and the bollards outside St Paul's (London) are carved from it. 

When we visited, we were actively encouraged to take a bit of the granite each away with us – the quarry get lots of goodwill and a bit of waste rock removed for free and the student gets a specimen for their collection.  Win-win!  The smokers (as I was then) were sitting playing chimneys on a wall outside our accommodation and we all agreed that while we had been fascinated by all of our site visits, visiting Shap quarry had genuinely felt like a rite of passage with our hand specimens feeling like tokens of that rite.

Needless to say, the granite at the top of this post is the piece I brought back with me.

#100Photos #38