VI.—Note on a Greywether at Bayswater

Extract

My attention was directed last Christmas to the cellar of the King's Head, in Moscow Road, Bayswater. Some enlargement of the premises was required, and the base of the cellar was to be lowered. About, a couple of feet beneath the old floor, the workmen came upon a block of stone, which resisted all their efforts to dislodge it: and no wonder! The stone proved to be a huge Greywether, of irregular quadrangular form, measuring 9 ft. 6 in. in length and also in breadth, and as much as 2 ft. 8 in. (possibly more) in thickness. A portion of one side appeared to be a joint-plane; otherwise the mass exhibited the ordinary contours of a concretionary block of sandstone. The rock itself was purely siliceous, and presented the familiar saccharoid aspect of a Wiltshire Greywether. Clean sand was found here and there in hollows on the surface of the stone, tending to prove that it had never been disturbed by human agency. It had evidently found a natural resting-place in the basement-portion of the Thames valley-gravel, close upon its junction with the London Clay ; the lowest bed reached in the cellar being “stiff loam.” These facts I was enabled to observe under the guidance of Mr. B. J. Capell (architect and surveyor).