When I was in the second year of secondary school (aged 13) we went on a five day school trip to Gloucestershire in the west of England.
During the course of that trip we had to do all sorts of fieldwork.
One day we went to visit the stone circle in Avebury, Wiltshire. I have a blurred, faded and cropped photo of that day:
I'm the dark-haired boy sat on the ground, as if you could not guess...
[Side Note: Later that year I had a feud with one of the boys, who I cut out of the picture. Stalin would have been proud of me!]
Another day we went out to visit the Devil’s Chimney and go fossil hunting in an old limestone quarry.
The Devil's Chimney
Human History v Fossilized Fish
When it came to doing fieldwork, if the project had an historical or topographical theme (such as the visit to Avebury stone circle) then I was interested, but the idea of grovelling around an old quarry vainly searching for fossils of prehistoric shellfish left me rather cold and bored. (Glad I’m not 13 any more!)
That was in part due to my upbringing I suppose.
One of the greatest gifts my Dad gave me was a love of history, and human pre-history too, right from a very early age.
On the other hand my Calvinist Mum had railed against the wickedness of evolution being taught at school and was adamant that dinosaurs aimlessly wandering the planet millions of years before God had created it were inventions of the devil.
I remember feeling very uncomfortable as a seven year old at primary school when the topic was "Dinosaurs." What it taught me, however, at a very early age, was that different "authorities" could hold conflicting views about the world which I had to learn to navigate.
It keeps you on your toes, I can tell you!
Aimless wanderings of an alienated teenager
Anyway, getting back to the point, and speaking of "aimlessly wandering," I wandered aimlessly about that god-forsaken quarry making very little effort to search for fossils, not out of any inherited dogmatic intolerance of prehistoric species, God forbid, but more likely due to a severe case of teenage alienation.
The whole exercise seemed futile even if a few eager swots did manage to find some rather doubtful specimens to take back to the teachers.
Towards the end of that tedious exercise I ambled back towards the meeting point and as I did so I passed a rock about the size of a bag of flour and I thought to myself,
“Right, I’ll pick it up and drop it just to say I did something.”
So I picked it up and - this is the moment that remains fossilized in my memory - I dropped it, and it fell apart and revealed a…
Well, I don’t really know what it revealed, perhaps an ancient coral or something.
The King of Fossils
Whatever it was, it was definitely an old fossil.
The lines of the fossil were clearly discernible so I picked up the two bits and wandered back to the teachers who looked (rather like goggle-eyed fossils) at my find, perhaps suspecting that I had nicked it from one of the weedier pupils or something.
The shocking thing was, the fossil I had accidentally found was the biggest and best find of the day! It was the King of the fossils, the quarry V.I.P! (Or, V.I.F, I should say: Very Important Fossil.)
My Malicious Delight!
Most delightful of all was how my it put the diligent swots’ noses out of joint that such an idle wretch as I should take the prize!
Another malicious pleasure I had was returning home and triumphantly showing off my trophy - a FOSSIL of a sea critter that I picked up high on a hill - to my less than impressed mother!
Fossils, eh. They're either the Devil's work or evidence of Noah's flood.
Cheers!
David Hurley
The Devil's Chimney Photo: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Devil%27s_Chimney_(Gloucestershire)#/media/File:Devils.chimney.viewpoint.at.leckhampton.arp.jpg