Netherlands -
flinty sandstone
ECOS, Frome, Somerset
European Community Of Stone

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Flinty sandstone

About the rock: This monolith is a brown-crusted rock, mottled with orange-yellow patches and is simply called ‘flint’. It certainly is flinty in nature and very, very hard but a grain texture can be seen when it is studied with a hand lens. In this country we would call the rock ‘sarsen’, like those of Avebury and Stonehenge. This rock is Neogene or Pleistocene in age and was formed from sands which covered a vast area of the Low Countries. Like the formation of UK sarsens, these sands were locally consolidated when silica-rich springs bonded the grains into a tough sand rock; hard and flinty, perhaps one of the toughest of rock types. Once again, this detail can be debated! Place of origin: When it came to the Netherlands, it would be a fair question to ask, ‘What stone occurs in Holland that could stand up to Mendip weather?’. This would be to forget Maastricht and the quite hilly region of the Netherlands where it borders the Belgian Ardennes, from where this rock originates.