Geology Site Account

Site name: Wenden Place Boundary Wall

Grid reference: TL 5119 3637

Brief description of site:

Ancient brick wall inlaid with numerous glacial erratic boulders.

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Details

The boundary wall to Wenden Place in Wendens Ambo is a very striking feature adorning the corner of Royston road at the junction with Duck Street, opposite the church. The wall is a grade 2 listed feature. It is a red brick flint and stone wall, about 3.6m high with brick capping and panelled with brick piers. The wall extends in a quadrant from east end of Wenden Place to the south end of the Old Post Office. This ancient wall has a remarkable variety of local rocks used in its construction, including many large boulders. The largest is a boulder of Hertfordshire puddingstone 1.4 metres (46) long.

These boulders and pebbles, with the exception of flints, are glacial erratics; rocks carried to Essex by the Anglian ice sheet which covered almost the whole of Britain during the coldest period of the Ice Age, some 450,000 years ago. The boulders are likely to have been found in local fields or excavated from local gravel pits around Wendens Ambo and brought to the village.

Although the pavement is narrow the wall provides an excellent opportunity to learn to identify different rocks, to see different rates of weathering, and to guess where the stones might have come from.

In the long grass on the opposite side of the road is a sarsen stone.

The Wendon Place Boundary Wall. Photo: M. Ralph