Monday, February 06, 2006

My round rocks

There is a blogger called Pablo who owns some land called Round Rock. It sounds like a pretty cool place, what with all those round rocks that were formed by a meteorite 350 million years ago or so. It's hard not to be jealous.

So imagine my joy when hubby and I were walking recently, and I glanced down... "Hey, look! Round rocks! Round rocks!"

A pause.

"It's slag," said hubby.

He is always ruining my fun like that.



I looked it up, and he was right. There are several types of slag, all of which are by-products of iron and steel furnaces.

They use it a lot for railroad track ballast.



In contrast to the round (pelletized) slag, which seems heavy for its size, this type (expanded or foamed) is incredibly lightweight. It's porous like a lava rock.

There's also a vitrified or glassy type of slag, which we found but failed to bring back. (If it ever stops raining I'll try to go back and get one of those and put the pic here, for the sake of completeness.)



My husband calls this configuration Slaghenge.

10 comments:

Rurality said...

Pablo's blog is apparently down right now... It's got the "403 error", which I've been seeing a lot since Blogger was down frequently over the weekend. I'm hoping he's not got major trouble, and will be back soon!

Anonymous said...

Pablo is hoping the same thing.

Not only are your round rocks a pleasure, but your photograpy, as usual, does them great credit.

Sabine said...

There is a National Slag Association??? What next?

R.Powers said...

So do you have an old railbed running through your gorgeous property?

Slagadelic baby!

Oh behave!

robin andrea said...

Your round rocks are very cool. They may not have the stunning, other-worldly history of Pablo's round rocks, but the ones you found are round and they do rock!

Jenn said...

Found art is always fun.

I love picking things up and reconfiguring them into surprising arrangements.

Slaghenge makes me smile much. Good show!

Rachel said...

Slaghenge! Good name!

Marie said...

I adore whimsical posts like this!

Anonymous said...

I like stones, have collected some different ones too on our journeys. The only problems is that you can't take the most interesting ones with you as they often are too big...

It's interesting to see the difference in them though.

Really fancy name slaghenge :-)

Rurality said...

Thanks y'all! Pablo's site is back up - go see his rocks too!