Paleontica Community

Hi everyone,

I just stayed a few days in Domburg.
Everywhere at the beaches of Westkapelle and Domburg you can find flintstones from small pebbles to larger pieces, like the one shown in the pics.
Mostly they are black, but some are brownish.

Where do they come from? What's their origin?
I suppose they were transported from coastal Normandy by sea, but I'm not sure.
There are no cretacous layers in Walcheren or Zeeuws Vlaanderen, right?

Thanks for your help,
Regards,
Bernd

Hello and welcome!

Yes, you can find loads of flintnodules and stones on the beaches of Walcheren. I know them from between Vlissingen and Dishoek where i try to collect the blackest for knapping. I am not sure where they have been dredged from, probably from the Northsea, or the Westerschelde itself. The origins are probably Ice-age related, old fast flowing proto Schelde/Maas/Rijn systems bringing in loads of larger stones. There is probably someone here who can explain this better.

They are marvellous!

Smaug schreef: ↑08 okt 2021, 11:04 I am not sure where they have been dredged from, probably from the Northsea, or the Westerschelde itself. The origins are probably Ice-age related, old fast flowing proto Schelde/Maas/Rijn systems bringing in loads of larger stones. There is probably someone here who can explain this better.

I don't know something about the proto Schelde.

Here on the banks of the Lower Rjjn (also on holocene river deposits), from Düsseldorf up to north, you can also find a lot of flint nodules, so called Maas eggs.
They were build in the Limburg-Aachen area in the Campanian, washed out and relocated eastward by the transgressions of the miocene Northsea.
In the Lower Pleistocene the flintstone was relocated again by the proto Maas-Rijn river system.

But the flintstones of the Lower Rhine area differ from the Walcheren flint.
They are egg-shaped and greyish in common, sometimes with coloured ribbons or agatized.
In some deposits you can find larger flintstones or of irregular shapes, broken pieces of huge shelves. They origin in Scandinavia, drifted by the ice shelf of the last ice age (one glacial tongue reached to the borders of Düsseldorf).

Walcheren flint reminds me of flintstones you can find in northern Germany, so called Dan-flint from Scandinavia.
Maybe the ice-shelf drifted them to the Netherlands and the proto Schelde, evtly proto Maas (I think the proto Rijn was not envolved), transported them to the coast.
The flintstone line (end of the last ice shelf) lays near Utrecht and Amersfoort.