Category: Stories in Stone Blog

As someone who focuses on building stone and the use of stone in non-natural situations, it was a pleasure to read about Ian’s Accretionary Wedge #42. He asks “Have you seen a great countertop out there?  Sure, everyone says it’s “granite”, but you know better.  Take a picture, post it on your own blog or send it to me and I’ll post it for you.  Do you think you know what it is or how it was formed?  Feel free to include your own interpretation and I’m sure others will enjoy joining in the discussion.”

He raises a good point that in the countertop trade rocks seem to come in just two varieties: marble and granite. If it looks granular or granitic, it is a granite. If it looks marbled or veiny, it is a marble. One of the few places that I have seen another type of stone mentioned was in Bloomington, Indiana, where I saw an add for apartments that included limestone countertops. This makes sense because of the location, in the heart of the Indiana stone belt.

Trying to choose one favorite countertop or other human-manipulated stone is a challenge. I have written about some of my favorites, the wonderful treestump gravestones of Indiana, but thought I would turn to another rather unusual stone structure. I have never seen it but have read about it. It is William Buckland’s Coprolite Table on display at the Lyme Regis Museum. That site contains a link to nifty, in-depth article about the table. Here’s a quick summary.

Both photographs from Richard Bull’s fine paper on the table.

Reverend William Buckland was an eccentric Oxford geologist who coined the term “coprolite,” meaning “dung-stone,” in 1829. The table was made from coprolites most likely collected at Wardie, Edinburgh, in 1834. It was on display in his drawing rooms he had a two homes. Making up the surface of the table are “64 sectioned oval coprolitic nodules,” which closely resemble beetles but are in fact fish poops. They come from a 330-million-year old shale deposited in a freshwater lake.

In 1836, Buckland wrote about the coprolites in his famous Bridgewater Treatise:

Mr W C Trevelyan recognised Coprolites in the centre of nodules of clay ironstone, that he found in a low cliff composed of shale, belonging to the coal formation at Newhaven, near Leith. I visited the spot, with this gentleman and Lord Greenock, in September 1834 and found these nodules stewed so thickly upon the shore, that a few minutes allowed me to collect more specimens than I could carry. Many of these contained a fossil fish, or a fragment of a plant, but the greater number had at their nucleus, a Coprolite, exhibiting an internal spiral structure: they were probably derived from voracious fishes, whose bones are found in the same stratum. These nodules take a beautiful polish, and have been applied by the lapidaries of Edinburgh to make tables, letter presses, and ladies ornaments under the name of Beetle stones from their supposed insect origin.

The Lyme Regis Museum acquired the table in 1928 as a gift from Buckland’s grandson.

So, the Brits finally fessed up that indeed they did plant a fake rock in a park outside of Moscow to spy on Russia. The story first arose in 2006 when Russian Intelligence claimed that British diplomats had used the rock to download and transmit information about Russian NGOs, or Non-Governmental Organizations. At the time, the British government denied any knowledge of the rock or the spying.

But on Thursday, in a BBC documentary, Jonathan Powell, who in 2006 was Chief of Staff for Prime Minister Tony Blair, admitted that “they had us bang to rights.” (For those unfamiliar with this phrase, it means caught red-handed. There appears to be some dispute as to whether it is of British or American origin.) Powell added that “Clearly they had known about it for some time and had been saving it up for a political purpose.”

That purpose appears to be Putin’s clamping down on NGOs. Supposedly, the British were funding NGOs that sought to promote democracy and human rights. An article in yesterday’s Guardian newspaper quoted human rights activist Lev Ponomaryov. “For any thinking person this rock meant nothing – it was simply a provocation, a cheap trick used by a former KGB agent.” The British continue to deny that the had illegally funded any NGOs.

[nggallery id=21]Curiously, the Russians have long been known to use such fake rocks themselves. In an interview on C-Span in 2000, author David Wise described how double-agent Joe Cassidy used fake rocks for Russian spy drops in the 1960s and 1970s.

Sergeant Cassidy made one for me o–out of papier-mache. He
 showed me how it’s done. And it looks absolutely realistic. Then he
 would roll it in the dirt to–to look like a rock, to pick up some 
dirt. And it was kind of gray looking to begin with. And the inside 
would be completely hollow. And in there, he would have some
ti–ordinary tinfoil that you would buy at the supermarket.

And inside the tinfoil, he would wrap the film of the documents he had
secretly photographed on behalf of the Russians. All was under the
control of the FBI and the Joint Chiefs of Staff at the Pentagon. The
 Russians would then pick up this–this–these films and they would 
develop them and they would think they had the secret documents.

In regard to the modern rock, my big question is whether it looked authentic or not. I think that it does. The rock looks like sandstone or limestone and Moscow is known to have subsurface karst limestone. So, I like to think that even if the Brits made what some call an embarrassing choice by using the rock and then denying it, they at least may have gone to the effort to choose a geologically appropriate rock.