Mineral Specimens

My geology collection, like the fossil one - here - is a record of the places I've been and the memories I have of them. This is the first mineral I ever collected and, at the time, I hadn't a clue what it was. I was sold it in Algeria when I was hitch-hiking in North Africa in 1964. The specimen was much bigger when I bought it but it broke into several pieces on the way home in my rucksack. It's a form of selenite gypsum called desert rose and I didn't believe the man when he told me it forms under sand dunes.

The pink crystal is orthoclase felspar and the grey is quartz, and this was part of a large rock in a wall in the garden of our house in Rhodesia where we lived from 1967-70. The rock was nothing but massive crystals of quartz and felspar and must have come from a huge pegmatite vein.

I have had this mineral specimen since our days in Rhodesia and I still don't know what it is. The rock was lying in a road which skirted a mine site in eastern Rhodesia and had obviously fallen off a truck. The security around the workings suggested that what was being mined was strategically important.

I used to take my A-level students at Ludlow Grammar School to Pennerley in the Shelve district of Shropshire where there were lead mines which dated back to Roman times. In the mine tailings plenty of good specimens could be found if you had the patience. The golden crystals are chalcopyrite, an ore of copper, on a gangue of crystals of quartz and calcite.

Pebbles of jasper were easy to find on the beaches along Palisadoes, the spit which encloses Kingston harbour, which we often visited in the years 1973-75 when we lived in Jamaica. I never did any tumbling of semi-precious stones but I did spend a few hours shaping this into something that could be used as a pendant.

When our son David came back from his wanderings in Australia he brought back this fine specimen of gem opal from Coober Pedy, the only place it's found.

We spent a day with a guide in the desert to the south and east of Swakopmund, Namibia, when we visited the country in 2009. He took us to a small, abandoned mine out in the desert which someone had worked for mica. The 'books' of mica were huge: this specimen is 15cm across.