The Stockton boulder is outside Braunston House in Stockton (24 High Street). It had railings around it (as shown in the photograph) and these were removed for the war effort to make ammunition and no railing guard or equivalent has since replaced it. I was told that it was from the ice age (as reinforced by my Uncle who lives in the village still).
I have found some details relating to the boulder online. It seems the Revered Tuckwell delivered a lecture in 1882 in which ‘he showed that the Stockton Boulder must have come from Mount Sorrel in Leicestershire, a distance of 60 miles, in the arms of a glacier on an iceberg, at a time when this country, together with the whole of Europe as far south as central Germany, lay for ages buried in snow and ice.’1
Braunston House
Braunston House, behind the boulder, was so called because it is the name of the village where my great grandmother Annie Wilks (nee Dickens, related to the author Charles) previously lived. In this photo Braunston House is part shop and part home, as it was when my great grandparents Thomas and Annie Wilks lived there and ran the grocers and butchers (I was told it was one half butcher shop and the other half grocery). It may even be my relatives in the photo. My great grandfather also etched his initials in the brickwork which can still be seen today.
1 http://www.stocktonsnews.org.uk/sites/default/files/2015-02.pdf (accessed 3/11/2015. Now dead link)
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