ON THE ENDLESS HERE

Stuart Jones

 

A few years ago a friend phoned Stuart up one evening to let him know about a storm over Bridlington, a big one. In the post-storm calm Stuart drove up from Hull in the hope of finding some decent erosion at Sewerby and what resulted was the most revealing photographic evidence of the Ipswichian buried cliff and raised beach in existence. He was also there at the finding of an Elephantus antiquus fossil tooth at this iconic quaternary location. Stuart knows this headland well.

 

Bridlington and Flamborough beaches were a playground for Stuart as a child. By the age of 14 he and his friend John Earnshaw had mapped the coast from Bridlington to Sewerby Steps and Stuart had amassed a large collection of fossils.  John later went on to be the first curator at Sewerby Hall Museum.

 

After the Hull fishing fleet demise in 1976, where he had worked as a shipwright, Stuart discovered a prospectus for Hull University offering courses in geology. He joined the adult education course run by Mike Horne (who, to quote, “is an excellent teacher, he perseveres”), and he also joined Hull Geological Society (HGS), where he has been a key member for the past 15 years. Stuart runs the HGS Roadshows regionally, “spreading the good word” to those who have not yet caught the geological bug, with one memorable occasion of fossils-by-gas-light in the atmospheric Nellie’s tavern in Beverley.

 

Stuart speaks lovingly of fossils, saying “they won’t be found until they’re ready to be found”, and describes the learned intricacies of extracting them from the local rock. Around the headland the chalk apparently behaves in differing ways – in Sewerby where thinly layered Flamborough Chalk abounds, it is pitted, powdery and soft, and splits after a few chisel blows; heading west to Danes Dyke the chalk hardens, the chisel starts to bounce back and the chalk chimes like a bell; at Selwicks the bluish, springy Burnham and Welton Chalks become seriously smooth and hard (more worthy of a sledgehammer approach apparently)!  It takes experience and patience to extract fossils from the differing matrices and Stuart possesses both.

 

As a member of the Flamborough Quaternary Research Group, Stuart sees himself as a surveyor, a mapper, a facilitator with the experience of knowing intimately the place and locals since childhood. About each newly extracted fossil or eroded, exposed cliff face he says: “I am the first person on this earth to have seen this; it is the same in fishing: when that trawl net breaks the surface everyone is looking, we see things in front of us that have never been seen before. Through such occurrences, hope springs eternal.”

 

Words by Anna Kirk-Smith