The Goldstone

We don’t really do big stones much down here in Sussex so it felt quite an honour to photograph this monster. I’d seen old photos of the Goldstone and didn’t quite appreciate just how bloody huge this stone is. This could stand proudly with anything at Avebury or a number of any other megalithic sites, it’s just the surroundings which make it all a bit surreal, the twee fencing, the rumble of traffic on the Shoreham Road only fifty metres away and the Burger King, DFS and Comet showrooms on the other side of the road! The Goldstone and the nine smaller stones surrounding it (from a different location, as is the Goldstone itself) is very similar to the stones I recently saw at Winterbourne Abbas, a conglomeration of flint and sandstone. The smaller stones also seem to have suffered more from erosion over the last hundred years or so judging by the older photos or maybe they’ve just been laid on their sides. The other thing that struck me, and I have to say I usually find this sort of thing extremely cheesey, was the face thing on the western side which looked like it was in a deep sleep. It must have looked very impressive before being buried, resurrected and re-sited here in the corner of Hove Park facing passively out to sea.