Sand

This sand is from the collection of the late Ivor Treby. He collected it on De Saram Road by the Ivory Inn Hotel on Mount Lavinia.

The hotel is some 170m inland from the shoreline. The sand is a rather poorly sorted (0.05-4mm) beach sand possibly representing a former shoreline or dunes. The mineral content indicates a granitic or metamorphic rock input.

The sand includes a scatter of white shell, abraded foraminiferans and calcareous bryozoan fragments. The quartz grains are transparent to translucent, colourless, angular to sub-rounded and some grains are polished.
Biotite is rare but present as flakes. Feldspar is white sub-rounded to rounded. Some quartz grains contain parts of black prismatic crystals, possibly tourmaline. Tourmaline may also be present as separate black grains. A scatter of black glossy magnetic grains (magnetite) and soft brown non-magnetic grains (Limonite).

Ivor was a biochemistry teacher and poet with over 400 published poems. He considered himself to be a gay literary activist.

Ivor took early retirement in the 1980s and dedicated his time to researching two Victorian/Edwardian women poets who wrote under the pseudonym Michael Field. He also spent much of the next 20 years travelling abroad. Wherever he went he collected samples of sand and sediment.

He was meticulously organised. His personal archive of poems, postcards, letters and research is held by the Bodleian Library at the University of Oxford. For more information on Ivor and the archive please see their website http://www.bodley.ox.ac.uk/dept/scwmss/wmss/online/modern/treby/treby.html