Nature notes with Richard Williamson
WHEN I was nine years old, father thought I should help on his Norfolk farm by picking flints off the fields. My brother Robert and I lugged baskets of the beastly things into the woods at Stiffkey and they are there to this day waiting to be discovered by Tony Robinson and the Time Team.
It was only when I came to Sussex that I learned to love flints. Plodding the Downs for 40 years I learned to look two metres ahead as well as scanning the horizon for stone curlews and wheatears.
Now and then, amid the millions of stones dispersed in the shrapnel of mischance, I have found a treasure.
That smooth, curved link to ancestors 4,000 years ago one day found a warm palm again. It is an axe-head: a celt, pronounced selt.
For full feature see West Sussex Gazette April 18