FLINT

This flint was collected from a pile of excavated material in the High Street of Guildford, my home town. Its extraordinary and interesting form is thought to be as a result of a semi-liquid silaceous material filling up cavities in chalky bedrock, where it solidified.

Like fossils often found nearby, it is millions of years old.

The shadows of this flint, made by the sun, provoked an inspiring study, the beautiful forms mockingly reminding us that reinforced concrete is only one hundred and fifty years old, that Newcomen's steam engine invention was just three hundred years ago and the origins of Stonehenge are a mere five thousand years in the past.

The flint was formed well before the dinosaurs disappeared at the cretaceous-palaeocene extinction of sixty-six million years ago.

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