KNAPPINGS
CORES

Bob’s Body

Rock-hard Bob, dreamtime giant, sleeps curled up in the arm of the Kennet just south of Reading town. Southampton Street and Silver Street scar his back, carry pilgrims to his belly-top at Whitley Pump, once known to all as Bob’s Mount. A much-knapped chap, this great chalk hillside, hacked away in quarries, trussed up in streets and houses, but he has his revenge as the houses on Edgehill Street tumble slowly into the abyss.

Devious stuff, the flinty chalk of hereabouts, collapsing and eroding, burrowed out by nature and by artifice. Caverns appeared in the playground of Katesgrove School a decade ago, promptly sealed with concrete. Field Road, across the Kennet in Coley, is currently collapsing into the chalk-mines beneath, and over in the Caversham hinterland the ‘swallow hole’ ponds appear overnight and disappear as fast. Widmore Pond at Sonning Common engulfed a farm, according to one story; a coach-and-horses according to another. There’s a "Whirly Hole" at Playhatch, and Comp Wood Pond at Binfield Heath disappeared one Wednesday afternoon in January 1955:

"after people had noticed a very bad smell in the vicinity, there was a loud noise and the pond began to soak away underground. According to an eye-witness, about three hours later there was a ‘tremendous bang like a bomb exploding and four fully-grown trees disappeared straight down into the ground in a matter of seconds, sending up a great waterspout. All that night, noises ‘like doors being banged’ came from the pond and by the morning all the waters had drained off into a chasm estimated at 100-150 feet deep, in which the trees could be seen". One intrepid chap went down by ladder and found "clear traces of the old chalk miners’ activities".
(R W Ford, A description of Binfield Heath and the surrounding district in Oxfordshire 1958, pp 3-4)

Bob’s Mount became popular with amateur geologists and archaeologists after Dr Plot first drew the attention of the nation’s scholars to the vast piles of oysters to be found upon Bob’s back. Remains of a Roman feast ? To Mr Allen, schoolmaster at Reading in 1752,

"these strange reliques of the main declare
That the rough sea once drove its billows there;
That o’er the rising hill embrown’d with shade,
The stream-wash’d valley and the verdant mead,
The grazing Sea-calf trod with humid foot,
And cropp’d the budding coral’s tender shoot"

... Evidence, of course, for the Flood of Noah:

"Approach, thou impious wretch, who, blind yet bold,
Presum’st to doubt what sacred lips have told,
That by divine command the rising wave,
The womb of nature once, was once her grave."
(in Charles Coates, History and Antiquities of the Town of Reading, 1802 p 395)

Other eighteenth-century antiquaries found ‘eggfish’ on the Mount, but there was nothing to match the flinty Katesgrove Spider, who astonished the readers of the Gentleman’s Magazine in 1769.

"It is recorded that during some digging a flint had been cracked, and from out of the middle of the flint walked a spider. It was seriously held that it was impossible for the spider to have found a way into the flint and that, therefore, the flint must have been formed around the spider. For how many million years that patient spider had been awaiting release from its captivity was a cause for many disputes" (Leslie Harman, S. Giles in Reading, 1946 p75)

In this most red-brick town, flint projects like tough geology from an earlier time. The Abbey and St Mary’s are relics of an age before the clayfields were harnessed: hallowed bulwarks, the cores of abbey walls now crumbling into crazy outcrops, great worn walls of holes to mock the people pent in prison and in office gaols beside them; squared stone facings long since looted to found renaissance mansions, and the very cobbles of the flint transported by the Tudors to the rebuilding of St Mary’s (a slight avenged, since that church, the heart of the old town, had been supplanted by the upstart abbey in the East.)

The Flint Road