On Hamstone, Purbeck Marble and Portland Stone (J C Powys, Wood and Stone)

John Cowper Powys, in his early novel "Wood and Stone" (1915, dedicated to Thomas Hardy) writes about Ham Hill, near Montacute, Somerset ("Leo's Hill", near "Nevilton") and Hamstone and compares it with rival stones from Purbeck and Portland:

"What especially separates the Stone of Leo's Hill from its various local rivals, is its chameleon-like power of taking tone and colour from every element it touches. While Purbeck marble, for instance, must always remain the same dark, opaque, slippery thing it was when it left its Dorset coast; while Portland stone can do nothing but grow gloomier and gloomier, in its ashen-grey moroseness, under the weight of the London fogs; the tawny progeny of this tyrant of the western vales becomes amber-streaked when it restricts the play of fountains, orange-tinted when it protects herbaceous borders, and rich as a petrified sunset when it drinks the evening light from the mellow front of a Cathedral Tower".

On Ham Hill itself, from the beginning of Chapter One:

"Midway between Glastonbury and Bridport, at the point where the eastern plains of Somersetshire merge into the western valleys of Dorsetshire, stands a prominent and noticeable hill; a hill resembling the figure of a crouching lion".

See also, posting on John Cooper Powys and the English Landscape