Stone Tumbling - Beach Walks

You may well wonder how someone decides to become (what is commonly called?) a rock hound.  Well, after several years of hard studying with little or no time to take any exercise, my partner and I, decided to start taking regular walks along the beach.  We live in Pakefield where the pebble beach is not even a stone throw away, that, together with some nice balmy evenings, was the beginning of our beach walks.  I am not saying which one ... but you can actually see where we live in this picture!  If you know this area, you can probably pick out where the Jolly Sailor's pub is.  The picture above looks towards the south Lowestoft (sandy) beaches.

Travelling, or rather walking in the opposite direction takes you along past the caravan parks and holiday camp (Pontin's) until you reach some sandy cliffs.  

These cliffs are quite worrying - we are concerned with coastal erosion as we live so close to the beach.  During the summer it is possible to walk past these cliffs all the way to Kessingland (that is tiring for the unfit, believe me!).  During the winter months, walking this route is very tide dependant as can be imagined from this picture.  The sea crashes against the cliffs as shown, and as they mainly consist of fine sand, are prone to landfalls.

Its strange really, how you notice and become interested in the geology of an area when you finally notice things.  One example is these cliffs - you can clearly see different levels and colours of sand.  I know that this area was at the very edge of where the ice-sheet stopped thousands of years ago and that probably has something to do with the markings and lines in the cliffs.  But try as I could, there was not much information to be found about this in the local library.  Oh well.

So .. as we were walking along the shore one evening, I happened to pick up one really nicely coloured stone, then another which had a nice shape, then another and another, etc.  I then wanted to know what stones were available and thus my interest in stones started.

After looking around and surfing the net, it became obvious that stones of various types were easily available.  A few trips to the garden centre will ended up with me having loads of stones and rocks in store. After a while I had amassed quite a collection of stones.

But what do you do with them?  Polish them was the immediate solution that sprung to mind and a message was posted onto the newsgroups asking for information and ideas as to what we could actually do with them.  Not only did we receive ideas, JoRoCo posted that there was a second-hand tumbler to be purchased (I responded the same day).  So finally we arrived at the point when the tumbler arrived.  

Mags