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On Thursday morning, the second half of the device - which weighs a few tens of kilos - left its cleanroom to be picked up by a crane and lowered 100m into the cavern hewn out of the local Molasse sandstone to house the CMS experiment.

That same quarry yielded the molasse rock that makes up the core of the Palais Idéal du Facteur Cheval, a marvel of outsider art about 18 miles northeast of Tain in Hauterives.

It is found in the Pliocene sands of Holland, the Eocene sands of Paris and the “Molasse” of Switzerland, but is much more abundant in the Lower Cretaceous rocks of N. Europe, especially in the subdivision known as the Greensand.

O. Heer, who examined the numerous plant remains from these beds, concluded that they belonged to the same geological horizon as the Molasse or Oligocene of Switzerland.

Miocene molasse with Clypeaster, &c., forms the plain of Aleria on the east coast, and occurs also at St Florent in the north and Bonifacio in the south.