Country diary: Physical graffiti that takes us deep into this hill's past

Hardown Hill, Morcombelake, Dorset: What I mistake for paint in fact dates back 100m years, and was later mined by men in wire gogglesThe chunks of rock looked as if they had been splashed with blue and pink paint. I picked one up, ready to be outraged by vandalism, and found that the colours were natural. Even more perplexing, those stones had never seemed so vivid on my previous visits.It was raining and I had not seen the stones so wet before. The water had turned them semi-translucent and the bright inner hues of the rock showed through. Continue reading...