Westgarth Forster 1821: "Cauk, or barytic, spar"

One of the treasured crystallized minerals from the mines of Northern England is the barium sulphate barite (or baryte).

Beautiful doubly-terminated 6 cm blue barite from Frizington, Cumbria, with red areas resulting from hematite inclusions.


Westgarth Forster (1821, pages 216-217), makes the following comments on this mineral:


“Cauk, or barytic, spar, is not generally of so pure a white as the calcareous spars. The writer of this has seen cauk spar of a dead white, but commonly it is of a yellowish, a brownish, or a reddish white, or of a flesh colour, sometimes crystallized and transparent, as at Dufton-fell, in the county of Westmorland. It seems to affect the peculiarity of having its crystals laminated, as radiating from a centre, but this radiation seldom amounts to a whole circle. It is commonly a dull ill-looking spar, frequently rising in in globes and irregular masses, and so exceedingly heavy, that miners have always imagined it contained metal, only they think, that the proper flux for it is not discovered. No doubt this mineral body is replete with the vitriolic acid, which the art of the chemist may extract. At the same time, there is reason to believe it highly probable, that it is not the ore of any useful metal. This spar is so very ponderous, that it is often extremely difficult to separate it from the metallic ores in dressing them.”

Excellent specimens are known from West Cumbria, the Lake District, Alston Moor, Weardale and Yorkshire. The following specimens illustrate some of the forms and colours shown by this mineral in the Northern mines.

A 7 cm "cockscomb" of colourless transparent barite crystals from the Haggs Mine, Alston Moor, Cumbria.

Barite crystals, 45 mm, from the Murton Mine, Scordale, Cumbria.

Barite crystals to 3 cm in a 6 cm group, from the Force Crag Mine in the Lake District.

One of the famous old golden prismatic barite crystals from Frizington (probably Parkside Mine), this one 11.5 cm long.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Stone axes from the highlands of Papua New Guinea

Image
The story of first contact in 1933 with the peoples of the central Wahgi Valley in the Papuan highlands is a remarkable one. An unsuspected group of thriving stone-age cultures came to the attention of the outside world when the Leahy brothers first flew over the area and later reached it on foot. Tribal men carried elaborate stone axes and this contact with extant stone-age cultures provided fascinating insights on how their stone tools, such as axes and adzes were hafted. The available evidence was collated in Burton's (1984) Thesis at the Australia National University, on "AXE MAKERS OF THE WAHGI: Pre-colonial industrialists of the Papua New Guinea highlands." I saw a number of these old axes during a visit to the highlands near Mount Hagen in October 2018 (see the Paiya chief photograph below). The area of that journey is shown in the google Earth image shown below. The upper Wahgi River valley with locations of Paiya Village, Mount Giluwe and Mount Hagen t...
Read more

A Merovingian Croix Ancrée Tremissis, Sutton Hoo, and Declining Gold Content in the 7th Century Coinage

Image
In the recent Netflix film "The Dig" there is a scene in which Basil Brown's character shows a small gold coin, known as a tremissis, to Edith Pretty, confirming that the ship burial at Sutton Hoo is of Anglo Saxon age as he had previously suspected. A Merovingian tremissis found in Kent, 10 mm across 37 such coins, all from Merovingian Francia, were found at Sutton Hoo, associated with the remains of an elaborate purse. These coins have commanded a great deal of attention as a potential means to constrain the date of the burial. This is a highly imprecise process (the coins are not datable to within a range shorter than 16 years), relying on recognising issues associated with known rulers, identifying the youngest of these, speculating from there as to how much younger the undated coins may be, and then how much later the assembled group was deposited in the ship burial. The absence of locally minted coins in the group (the earliest were the East Anglian "trophy...
Read more

Horseshoe Crabs Past and Present: a NW Borneo Journey

Image
Horseshoe crabs figured strongly in my week. Last Saturday (April 1st 2017), I spoke with Kevin Laurie, a Hong Kong-based expert on horseshoe crab behaviour and conservation. He mentioned the existence of a wall decorated with horseshoe crabs in Kampung Ayer, the water village of Bandar, Brunei, in northwest Borneo. Armed with this tip, I visited Kampung Ayer on the evening of the following Thursday (April 6th), guided by two very knowledgeable locals, Wann and Mark Putera Delima. Kampung Ayer is an interesting place in itself, with Antonio Pigafetta describing the place as he found it when the surviving Victoria and Trinidad of Ferdinand Magellan's fleet visited in July 1521 (shortly after Magellan's death in the Philippines). His description of "Burne" was as follows: " that city is entirely built in salt water, except the houses of the king and certain chiefs. It contains twenty-five thousand hearths. The houses are all constructed of wood and built up fr...
Read more