The Goldstone Natural Rock Feature View all content for 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.

Posted by A R Cane 4th March 2010ce

Comments (4)
Nice to see a fellow admirer of this wonderful stone take an interest in publicising it's often ignored presence to the world. Have you read.. http://heritageaction.wordpress.com/2010/02/22/like-a-rolling-stone/ ?The day I photographed it...my companion on the day(a Hove resident) had been quite unaware of it's existence.There are a few sites around Sussex and indeed Surrey like this which are sadly neglected just through lack of knowledge...	Posted by Resonox 7th March 2010ce
Great - had no idea, either. But this is what TMA is for, isn't it?	Posted by GLADMAN 7th March 2010ce
Thanks for the link to Heritage Action, I hadn't seen that, but there are a few references to the Goldstone on various sites, not least the link I posted for Standing Stones in Sussex (http://www.sussexarch.org.uk/saaf/stones.html#sites2) which lists a lot of other obscure stones, almost all in East Sussex. I did wonder if there may once have been something in my home town of Worthing as we have a 'Steyne' Gardens in the town centre, but there's nothing there now and I can't find any evidence to suggest there ever was. Bit of a mystery and maybe it was just a Victorian rockery or the like!	Posted by A R Cane 7th March 2010ce
Interesting,I will look around next time I'm in Worthing(which is fairly often),it could well be a corruption of "stone/stane"..especially as there is the "Old Steine" in Brighton(I believe it is named after a house though) and Steyning just north(ish) of Brighton.Stane Street running through Pulborough and Billingshurst(A29) is the route of the Roman Road...but may well have been a track long before the romans came.	Posted by Resonox 7th March 2010ce
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