WHAT'S IN A PEBBLE?

 

We’ve all done it, teetered over great banks of pebbles throw up by pounded sea and millennia of winter storms. Great stripy granite boulder on parts of the west coast, to the flats skimming pebbles north of Ullapool, they come in every imaginable shape and size. The temptation to stack the flatter pebbles one atop another is evident from the number of precarious towers that sprout up during the summer months. Other might search out that solitary favourite pebble for its colour, marking or form, how it has worn down over time to produce something that fit perfectly into the palm of the hand. There is comfort in caressing in its smooth form and wonder at just how long it had been lying there amongst millions of other just waiting to your eye and for you to pick it up. Finding that perfect pebble can be a long process of chop and change, and then having found it some will take it home, a treasured memento, while others are contented to have turned it over in the palm of their hand then place it back with the others, or hurl it out to sea. I collected a large bag full while waiting for the ferry at Ullapool and pebbled the floor of my shower.

Obviously pebble are not just on the foreshore, and one I found recently when cutting peat. About 60cm down below the surface I wondered just how it could have arrived there. So perfectly did it fit into my hand and one side smooth as silk, had it been used as some sort of polishing tool, had someone discarded it centuries ago? It seemed hard to imagine how it had come to buried that far beneath the surface. Last year a close friend gave me a special pebble he had discovered when digging a grave for his faithful old dog. He had carried the pebble in his pocket for well over a year and felt it had some sort of protective quality. He wanted me to have it as protection against my cancer. I was truly overcome as I had known his dog since a pup and knew just how much she meant to him. I’ve made a little tweed pouch for the pebble and sleep with it tucked under my pillow. Maybe it is in the giving of such object that endows them with a special properties, like the finding of a four leaf clover; it won’t bring good luck to the finder, but it might to ever you give it to. A few years ago I found a flat pebble resting on parapet walls Garry Bridge. The brilliant yellow paint caught my eye with the silhouette of a Scottish piper. On the reverse was written Worlaby Rocks Facebook, keep me or re hide. J.R. Like a message in a bottle it can provoke a response or simple be set afloat again to drift. I had every intention of hiding this pebble but somehow it’s remained with me in a bowl in the kitchen. Perhaps this year it will continue it adventure. This summer I’m offering a large quantity of rock minerals and fossils from my cabinet of curiosities. They are from two different collections made during the latter part of the 19^th century. Some have been cut and polished to reveal an internal beauty, while others are housed in small decoupage treasure boxes and range from a couple of pounds to twenty pounds.

 My favourite pebble sits on a shelf above the Rayburn.  A small cream coloured circular pebble, it depicts a little grey hill with a perfect toadstool atop. It’s been forty years since I found it on St Mawes harbour foreshore in Cornwall, measuring only a couple of centimeters across it popped larger than life into my line of vision.