Thoughts on a Pebble
On pebbles, talismans and a pilgrimage to Anne Brontё's grave
All my life I have been drawn to pebbles. I always have one in my pocket, selected for an interesting pattern, for the way it feels in my hand or as a memento of a lovely day. Whenever I am by the coast, I am always taken by the amount of other people with their heads bent towards the ground, stopping when a particular pebble catches their eye. There are many reasons we are drawn to pebbles, and I think the most fundamental is that they are beautiful. They come in so many forms, colours, patterns. Tiny Hepworth sculptures forged by the sea, the fossilised remains of ancient creatures or forests or crystals of quartz or mica that glint in the sun and look like semi-precious gems. As the title (taken from an early contemplation on the subject of the same name by Gideon Algernon Mantell) suggests, this is not a comprehensive look at the pebble, but a collection of thoughts on what pebbles mean to us.
I follow in the footsteps of writers I admire, Anne Brontё and Mary Oliver, in loving these stones. Not only their beauty but the histories and stories they contain. In Mary Oliver’s poem Stones, she acknowledges the long lives of these small objects, their deep histories encased within. As Hikaru Okuizumi writes in The Stones Cry Out, ‘Even the smallest stone in a riverbed has the entire history of the universe inscribed upon it’. My attraction to this connection of the pebbles aesthetics and understanding their history makes sense. I am the daughter of a geologist and an artist. Mantell’s Thoughts on a Pebble begins to with similar musings to Mary Oliver on the journey the pebble has taken to end up in his hand, and in keeping with the intersection of art and science, includes poetry and the beauty of pebbles alongside his ‘lessons in geology’. An article in Brontё Studies about Anne Brontё’s pebble collection discusses whether she had an interest in geology or just found the stones interesting and concludes (I think correctly) that it was probably both. I love the idea of her keeping these stones, taking them back to the wild hilltops of the Pennines and having a piece of deep time carved by her beloved sea. I text photos of pebbles that I find to my Dad for identification, keen to know how they came to be here, smoothed, as Dana Gioia puts it beautifully, in his poem Sea Pebbles: An Elegy, ‘by the patient jeweller of the tides’. At the same time, my Mum and I collect the most beautiful to put on my Nan’s grave, arranging them in artful ways as she would have done.
It is not just about their aesthetics or history though; pebbles have a talismanic quality too. There is the obvious links of the hag stone to folklore, its hole being a portal through to the faerie realm and a protective amulet. I have a hag stone hanging by my bed. I am not superstitious but I do find its presence calming. I have other talismans too, such as the piece of granite from my beloved Dartmoor with its flecks of feldspar, quartz and mica, or the amber we found by the Baltic in Denmark, resin from an ancient forest. I often have a stone in my pocket, either my worry stone, smoothed by my thumb or just the most recently found one that I turn over in my hand when I am thinking. Not long ago, my brother and I visited the Yorkshire Museum and saw the Star Carr Pendant, a small piece of shale with a hole in it and engraved with a series of lines. It dates from the Mesolithic period and it isn’t exactly known what the purpose of it was, though the hole suggests that it was worn. Archaeologists aren’t sure what the engravings mean either, but have suggested they could be a tree, a map, a calendar or a counting system. The idea of a portable map worn around the neck, perhaps a beloved or important place, or even used as a talisman appeals to me the most. What I also loved about this artefact was the idea that we have been drawn to these objects for thousands of years, that is deeply engrained in who we are.
The almost spiritual quality of these stones led me to think about the relationship I have forged between pebbles and pilgrimage. I had long been drawn to Jim Ede’s pebble arrangements, and going to his home Kettle’s Yard, ‘the Louvre of the Pebble’ as Ian Hamilton Finlay’s phrases it on his engraved stone (which I have a postcard of on my studio wall), certainly felt like making a pilgrimage. Another, slightly wilder, place where the pebble is also focused on as a piece of art is Derek Jarman’s Prospect Cottage. I have vague memories of this magical place when I visited with my family as a child but a clearer version in my mind of a garden where pebbles are placed carefully amongst the plants was my Nan’s. Yet, it is beaches that are the most obvious site of pilgrimage for the pebble-lover. Clarence Ellis’s The Pebbles on the Beach mentions Scarborough as ‘one of the haunts of the inveterate pebble collector’, and it is where the grave of my fellow pebble collector, Anne Brontё, lies. So, one Saturday I set out with my yellow notebook, teal flask of coffee and a hag stone from Saltburn and make the pilgrimage there. Two trains later I alight to the sounds of gulls and make my way to the Rotunda Museum (a pebble pilgrimage is very much enhanced by a trip to a geology museum). Fossilised club moss, seed ferns and ginkgo trees alongside huge ammonites in a beautiful domed gallery, like a cathedral of geology. I then walk along the South Bay and pick up a small piece of quartz, smoothed by the waves, and make my way up a street called, fittingly, Paradise. At the top is St Mary’s Church, where Anne Brontё’s grave is. It is quiet in the churchyard but two people have beat me to her so I sit on a bench nearby and look at the sea. It is so peaceful here, with a beautiful view of the South Bay. When I get my chance to stand alone with Anne, I place my pebble at the foot of her grave. It is not the carnelian she collected but I hope she would have appreciated its smoothness and that she now has a small piece of the beach with her up on the peninsula. From South Bay I find a hag stone with two holes and put it in my pocket as a makeshift pilgrim badge. On the same museum visit that I saw the Star Carr Pendant, I found a tiny lead pilgrim badge of a scallop shell (associated of course with Santiago de Compostela) and although these badges are often described as souvenirs I do see them as a talisman of sorts for the pilgrimage. The pebble as a pilgrimage talisman or badge also reminds of Richard Long’s textworks Walking Stones and Crossing Stones where the movement of stones is imbedded in the importance of his walk.
As I have looked deeper into pebbles and those who love them it has been a joy to see how many others love them as I do, and the diverse nature of these people. I think of how all of us, myself and my fellow pebble collectors, are just a blip in the life span of these small stones. Christopher Stocks, in his conclusion to The Book of Pebbles, thinks about where our pebbles will end up. How they will become dust again, then new rocks and perhaps, in millions of years, they will once again be pebbles. I like the idea that just for a brief moment in geological time, a tiny piece of this process so much bigger than myself can be kept in my pocket or admired in a museum. That we can appreciate even the smallest of objects and their beauty.
Linocut print by myself, carved in early April 2024 after a trip to Saltburn.
Footnotes
The Stones Cry Out by Hikaru Okuizumi, published by Harcourt.
The Pebbles on the Beach by Clarence Ellis, published by Faber and Faber.
‘Anne Brontë and Geology: a Study of her Collection of Stones’ Brontё Studies, Jaspars, S., Bowden, S.A., Lozano Diz, E. & Hutchison, H. (47,2) Pg. 89-112.
Thoughts on a Pebble, Or, A First Lesson in Geology by Gideon Algernon Mantell, published by Reeve, Benham and Reeve (available to read for free on google books, the copy is stamped by the New York Public Library and has photocopied pages that occasionally feature the ghostly fingers of the person scanning it).
The Book of Pebbles by Christopher Stokes and Angie Lewin, published by Thames and Hudson.