The Goldstone in Hove Park
       
     
The stone in its original setting at Goldstone Bottom never had the surrounding stone circle
       
     
The Goldstone in Hove Park
       
     
The Goldstone in Hove Park

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 damned 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 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 stone in its original setting at Goldstone Bottom never had the surrounding stone circle
       
     
The stone in its original setting at Goldstone Bottom never had the surrounding stone circle