Snake Stones

...a thousand snakes each one
Was changed into a coil of stone

When holy Hilda prayed.

                                    Sir Walter Scott

A.R. introduced me to a new term yesterday: snakestones.  This is what fossil ammonites used to be  called.  Until natural historians started coming up with some better explanations for the existence of fossils (and there were some clever ones along the way), it was left to legend to explain their presence.  In the north, the Saxon Abbess of Whitby, St.Hilda, was given credit for turning a plague of snakes into stones.  Whether belief in her powers reached as far as the Isle of Portland is unknown by me so far, but ammonites were called snakestones in Dorset too.

After looking at the pictures of some of the fantastic fossils that had been dug out of the quarries, I have been wondering what Portlanders thought about these curious things.  Dealing with them first hand in their daily labors would mean that they had to have had some pretty definite opinions on the matter, one would think.

More on this topic soon.  


What is also becoming patently clear is that I am not going to find out an awful lot about the women and girls of Portland - other than maternity-related facts - as it's the men and their labors that have (as per boringly usual), been the stuff of historical record.  What were the women all doing day after day while the men were killing themselves hammering rocks out of the earth's crust?  Were there any Mary Annnings among my distant cousins scrabbling about collecting fossils?  Writers, chroniclers, quiet thinkers working in a shop that never got an inch of inkspace allotted to them for posterity?  What were the women who worked in the quarries doing?  Portlanders were reported to be such independent spirits, so was it the women that provided the collective backbone?   Probably... but how will I find out in what way?  

photo credit:
http://www.britishmuseum.org/explore/highlights/highlight_objects/loan_in/f/fossil_ammonites.aspx