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This pebble was found by a jobbing gardener amongst an old pile of pebbles probably collected from the shingle beach at Platte Saline, Alderney, Channel Islands.

The bottom left hand picture is approximately life size.

After examination of my photographs by two local archaeologists and a geologist and also by archaeologists at the Britsh and Natural History Museums in London, the census of opinion is that this stone has suffered natural wear by very long- term immersion in the sea and/or on a beach, and is not the result of human carving.

It is possibly a flint from a chalk ridge on the sea bed about 20 miles north of this beach. Many small and some large (to about 30cms) pieces of flint are washed up on this beach and from time to time in other places round the island, usually still with a thin layer of hard chalk on the outside of the object.

Hundreds, or possibly thousands, of worked flints, arrow and spear heads, scrapers, chisels, etc., some going back as much as 100,000 years have been found on the island irself in the last 150 years or more. There are no chalk deposits anywhere on, or close by, the Channel Islands, as far as is known and this ridge is the most likely source of the flints from which these were made.

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