Some of them will be very large--boulders of several
feet in diameter. If you move from town to town, from the north of
Scotland as far down as Essex on the east, or as far down as
Shrewsbury and Wolverhampton (at least) on the west, you will still
find these pebbles, but fewer and smaller as you go south. It
matters not what the rocks and soils of the country round may be.
However much they may differ, these pebbles will be, on the whole,
the same everywhere.
But if your town be south of the valley of the Thames, you will find,
as far as I am aware, no such pebbles there. The gravels round you
will be made up entirely of rolled chalk flints, and bits of beds
immediately above or below the chalk. The blocks of "Sarsden"
sandstone--those of which Stonehenge is built--and the "plum-pudding
stones" which are sometimes found with them, have no kindred with the
northern pebbles. They belong to beds above the chalk.
Now if, seeing such pebbles about your town, you inquire, like a
sensible person who wishes to understand something of the spot on
which he lives, whence they come, you will be shown either a gravel-
pit or a clay-pit. In the gravel the pebbles and boulders lie mixed
with sand, as they do in the railway cutting just south of
Shrewsbury; or in huge mounds of fine sweet earth, as they do in the
gorge of the Tay about Dunkeld, and all the way up Strathmore, where
they form long grassy mounds--tomauns as they call them in some parts
of Scotland--askers as they call them in Ireland.
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