Stone
Tumbling - Beach Walks
You
may well wonder how someone decides to become (what is commonly
called?) a rock hound. Well, after several years of hard studying
with little or no time to take any exercise, my partner and I, decided
to start taking regular walks along the beach.
We live in Pakefield
where the pebble beach is not even a stone throw away, that, together
with some nice balmy evenings, was the beginning of our beach
walks.
The picture above looks towards south Lowestoft (sandy) beaches
although what is shown above is mostly shingle.
.
Travelling,
or rather walking in the opposite direction takes you along past
the caravan parks and holiday camp (Pontin's) until you reach some
sandy cliffs.
The
cliffs above are quite worrying - we are concerned with coastal
erosion as we live so close to the beach. During the summer it is
possible to walk past these cliffs all the way to Kessingland.
During
the winter months, walking this route is very tide dependant as
can be imagined from this picture. The sea crashes against the cliffs
as shown, and as they mainly consist of fine sand, are prone to
landfalls.
Its strange really, how you notice and become interested in the
geology of an area when you finally notice things. One example is
these cliffs - you can clearly see different levels and colours
of sand. I know that this area was at the very edge of where the
ice-sheet stopped thousands of years ago and that probably has something
to do with the markings and lines in the cliffs. But try as I could,
there was not much information to be found about this in the local
library. Oh well.
So
.. as we were walking along the shore one evening, I happened to
pick up one really nicely coloured stone, then another which had
a nice shape, then another and another, etc. That was really the
start of our interest in various types of stones. You can get stones from
various sources such as specialised suppliers but you can also pick
up interesting stones from just about anywhere, even garden centres - so its worth keeping an eye out for
sources.
After
having obtained an amount of suitable stones, I posted a message to the newsgroups
asking for information and ideas as to what we could actually do
with them. Not only did we receive ideas,
JoRoCo posted that there was a second-hand tumbler to be purchased
(I responded the same day). So finally we arrived at the point when
the tumbler arrived. By this time we had amassed a whole collection
of stones of various shapes and sizes.
