12 
NATURAL HISTORY 
the workmen sand, or forest, stone. This is generally of 
the colour of rusty iron, and might probably be worked as 
iron ore ; is very hard and heavy, and of a firm compact 
texture, and composed of a small roundish crystalline grit, 
cemented together by a brown, terrene, ferruginous mat- 
ter ; will not cut without difficulty, nor easily strike fire 
with steel. Being often found in broad flat pieces, it makes 
good pavement for paths about houses, never becoming 
slippery in frost or rain ; is excellent for dry walls ; and is 
sometimes used in buildings. In many parts of that waste 
it lies scattered on the surface of the ground ; but is dug 
on Weaver^s Down, a vast hill on the eastern verge of that 
forest, where the pits are shallow, and the stratum thin. 
This stone is imperishable. 
From a notion of rendering their work the more elegant, 
and giving it a finish, masons chip this stone into small 
fragments about the size of the head of a large nail ; and 
then stick the pieces into the wet mortar along the joints 
of their freestone walls : this embellishment carries an odd 
appearance, and has occasioned strangers sometimes to ask 
us pleasantly, '^whether we fastened our walls together 
with tenpenny nails 
LETTER V. 
TO THOMAS PENNANT, ESQUIRE. 
MONG the singularities of this place, the 
two rocky hollow lanes, the one to Alton, 
and the other to the forest, deserve our 
attention. These roads, running through 
the malm lands, are, by the traffic of ages 
and the fretting of water, worn down through the first 
stratum of our freestone, and partly through the second ; 
so that they look more like water- courses than roads ; and 
are bedded with naked rag for furlongs together. In many 
