The Lee, Buckinghamshire

Geological puddingEnjoying coffee one morning at the Cock and Rabbit, by the village green at The Lee, my eye caught what looked like some sort of prehistoric standing stone. A little later I stepped outside to have a look. It’s clearly not a menhir, but in fact three chunky stones piled one on top of the other, and a further stone on the ground in front of the three. The Resident Wise Woman, a quick hand with online maps, has already identified them as ‘the Pudding Stones’ and was busily reading about them online as I took a photograph.I’m no expert in geology, but I’d come across puddingstone when reading about building materials. It’s a form of conglomerate stone, in which numerous small pebbles are fused together by a kind of natural cement made of sand and silica. The result resembles a geological plum pudding, hence the name. The stone is not uncommon in Hertfordshire and in the Chilterns (where we were at the time), and often occurs in the form of large lumps, moved around…