The picture above shows one of my most prized possessions found 30 years ago in long grass on the site of what was, until the Reformation, a large Cistercian monastic complex at Meaux on the eastern edge of the River Hull valley, east of Beverley (technically then a stolen artefact!). This block of carved chalk rock recently split along its bedding plane, previously having been a single block and having been so for hundreds of years. Experts believe the chalk-stone used in the 13th century when the original wooden buildings were being replaced with stone-built ones was quarried at the southern end of the Yorkshire Wolds in the area of Brantingham parish. Assuming this to have been the case the blocks of chalk, probably carved on the site of the Abbey rather than the quarry, would have been transported by boat down the Humber Estuary, up the Rive Hull and then up one of the first drainage canals dug by the early monks.
The shape of the block (before it split) suggests to me that it was either part of a column which had an attached fillet (the round bit) as a piece of late Romanesque/Early English decoration, or a small step being part of a spiral staircase somewhere in the monastic complex.
Chalk (not normally a long-lasting building stone) is a type of limestone composed mainly of the composite element calcium carbonate. Limestones are sedimentary rocks, varying according to the environmental conditions in which they were created, and subsequently compacted over geological time. Chalk was created as a sea-bed strata it being composed of an infinite number of coccoliths, these being the shells/skeletons of minute sea creatures that lived suspended in the seas and oceans of the Cretaceous Period (geology), about 90 million years ago. Chalk rock developed across stable geological conditions across millions of years during which time the deposits thickened and became compressed, eventually to form rock.
(To be continued).