Devizes Stone and "Pavementite"

The picture to the left shows Oolithic Limestone, you are not watching paint dry, but viewing, if you look very carefully, little pieces of shell, sand and shingle laid down millions of years ago on some prehistoric beach.  Over the millennia and with compression, this sea bed has formed itself into a usable building material, here used to construct a 16th century house in St John's Churchyard.



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These photos come from our Tuesday Geology walk around Devizes and oh how interesting it was.  My walks around town will never be the same.  What I thought was just another bit of old pavement (Pavementite) turns out to be Sarsen Stone and many of the shopfronts are faced with polished Granite, not an imitation fascia mass produced in China!   "Burton the Tailors" used polished Granite as a shopfront fascia on all their shops and it became known in geological circles as "Burtonite."  I learnt something new on Tuesday!