The Chalk Pit: The Dr Ruth Galloway Mysteries 9

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The speaker explains that the reason the place is empty, but also has the feeling that it very recently wasn’t. It is as if “just before / It was not empty, silent, still, but full” instead. He isn’t sure what kind of life would’ve been there, but it is perhaps “tragical” or of a tragic nature. The first speaker concludes his description by asking the second if “anything unusual” has “happened here”. The second speaker does have an answer, and that is no. It’s been empty for a “century” he adds. There is nothing that was “just” happening, even though the first speaker senses there was.

The Chalk-Pit | First World War Poetry Digital Archive The Chalk-Pit | First World War Poetry Digital Archive

Like its predecessors (The Woman in Blue, 2016, etc.), Griffith’s ninth is complex and character-driven, providing an excellent mystery whose very last sentence will leave you yearning for the next installment. Put your hands to the chalk slopes or exposed chalk surface and you we understand why the butterflies like to sunbathe on it.

The geology of the Chilterns, for example, was last mapped in 1912. Since then, the discipline has changed quite a bit. Geologists now know about plate tectonics and radiometric dating. There are laser-based distance measurements for elevation maps and digital terrain models and higher-definition Ordnance Survey maps, allowing hitherto unrecognised features to be recorded. All of this will affect the maps that are produced.

The Chalk Pit - Elly Griffiths

One of William Smith’s maps (the Delineation of Strata, 1815) on display at the Geological Society in Piccadilly, London. Photograph: David Levene/The Guardian Chalk was frequently quarried in Hertfordshire and across the Chilterns , but besides being quarried it was often more convenient to sink shafts to mine chalk from just below the Lower London Tertiaries. The ‘Chalk Drawers Arms’ pub at nearby Colney Heath (TL 208060) is a reminder of this activity in which small groups of men sank shafts, excavated the chalk and spread it on the land as a primitive manure. The Shenley Chalk Mine is one of the few places where the surface features of this activity can be examined by geologists.The precise extent of the flow is less predictable as various parts of the valley can be occupied by the surface stream in different years or even the same year. Very often flow starts at a series of springs just above White Hill (SP 991052), and sometimes a small lake accumulates here beside the road, but at other times it has started a short distance downstream below Mounts Hill (Mounts Rise). Sometimes the flow terminates in a swallow hole just upstream from Bottom Farm, but more often it flows through the garden of Bottom Farm and across the meadow to the east, then terminating either in a large gravel pit (TL 005061), which acts as another swallow hole or, when this overflows, the stream can extend through a culvert under the new A41 to the appropriately named hamlet of Bourne End, where the bourne joins the River Bulbourne Flood, S. & Ruston, A . (2004). Dury & Andrews map of Hertfordshire 1766. Hertfordshire Record Society.