Stone Will Answer

Beatrice Searle

Harvill Secker, £18.99

Review by Susan Flockhart

 

Why would a slight young Welsh woman want to drag her own bodyweight of Scottish rock and metal for hundreds of miles across the Norwegian countryside? Despite having read Beatrice Searle account of her extraordinary journey, I can’t pretend to fully understand what drove the then 26-year-old to sculpt a pair of footprints onto a 40kg lump of Orkney siltstone, traverse the North Sea with it on a century-old sailing boat and then haul it over hills and bogs on a home-made trailer while camping by night among the woods and wastelands. But I’ve certainly learned some interesting things about history, myth, stonemasonry and, above all, human resilience.

Searle was a fine art student with a passion for stone carving when she became fascinated by the geology of Orkney and, in particular, the legend of the Ladykirk Stone, which is said to have once seen service as a boat. Now stored under lock and key in St Mary’s Kirk, South Ronaldsay, this whinstone slab still bears the traces of a pair of saintly feet, having supposedly transported St Magnus across the Pentland Firth from Caithness during the 12th century. Intrigued by the impossible notion of a rock being used as a seaworthy vessel, Searle began hatching a plan to create her own “Orkney Boat” and embark with it on an audacious voyage.

By that time, Searle was a qualified stone mason who’d completed a three-year apprenticeship at Lincoln Cathedral. Having discovered a link between Lincoln’s mediaeval stone masons and their counterparts at Nidaros Cathedral, Trondheim, she realised the ancient St Olav’s pilgrim’s path from Oslo to Trondheim offered the perfect challenge.

Serendipitously, Orkney was just then preparing to mark 900 years since the death of its patron saint and the Islands Arts Council agreed to embrace (and part-fund) Searle’s project within its year-long anniversary programme. And in spring 2017, she strapped herself into her custom-designed harness and began pulling her stone along the first leg of the recently opened St Magnus Way pilgrim route.

Some of the wellwishers who’d gathered to see her off agreed to step barefoot onto the Orkney Boat. “Footprint stones” such as those found at Dunadd and Kintyre are thought to have once been used in ancient rituals by kings and travellers, and part of Searle’s mission involved inviting people she met on her journey to “draw the wisdom of forebears” from their contact with the rock.

That, at least, was the theory. Shortly after disembarking in Bergen, Searle experienced the first of many episodes of self-doubt that would dog her journey. None of the passing tourists seemed remotely interested in her stone and suddenly she found herself standing alone in the pouring rain, wondering what on earth she was doing there. It was a dispiriting moment yet oddly, it was at this point that Searle’s story came alive.

Searle’s rationale for her journey occupies several lengthy passages. It would help her become “embedded” in Orkney, a place “so inexplicable, so extraneous to me that it would be something of mine and mine only” “The combination of journey and stone had secrets to tell me.” There is speculation as to whether the soul’s weight can be calculable, and whether a 40kg stone might “feel like a perfect balance. Like health. Like freedom”.

Some of this left me scratching my head. Yet Searle is an excellent storyteller and when she simply describes the highs and lows of her journey, her narrative sings.

Taking in rough forest trails and a steep climb into the Dovrefjell mountains, the 643km pilgrim path would be taxing for anyone. Throw in a rickety trailer-boulder combo weighing more than their human draught-horse and it’s little wonder Searle sometimes came close to giving up – especially when her provisions got stolen or the trailer broke miles from the nearest settlement.

Tough as these setbacks must have been, they make for gripping reading. But perhaps the book’s most affecting thread concerns her disintegrating relationship with the man she refers to only as T. Although initially set on a solo journey, Searle had reluctantly agreed to accept her then partner’s offer to accompany her. “His journey I cannot and do not attempt to tell,” she writes, though of course, it would be impossible to describe her adventure without reference to the companion who carries their tent and provisions on his back, occasionally hauls the loaded trailer over the toughest terrain and shares Searle’s sleeping bag at the end of each arduous day.

T comes across as a decent person, though like Searle, he experienced moments of extreme physical and psychological distress. Some 35 days into their exhausting odyssey, having spent hours pushing what he calls Searle’s “pimped up sack barrow” up a precipitous incline, T snaps. “This is f***ing crazy,” he snarls. “Why am I doing this? Breaking my back.” To her credit, Searle doesn’t gloss over her own petulant response: “F*** off then and leave us alone! How dare you ask to come along, corrupting the beautiful simplicity of our journey and then be f***ing awful when it gets tough!” Unsurprisingly, perhaps, the couple split shortly after their return from Norway and “have not had any contact since”, though in the acknowledgements, Searle expresses unreserved thanks to her “extraordinary walking partner”. I wonder if he’ll read the book?

Searle wanted to learn the “lessons” stone had to teach her but it’s the human spirit that emerges triumphant in this sparky blend of memoir and travelogue. There is the kindness of strangers she meets on the pilgrim path: fellow travellers who share food, mend trolley-wheels and add their footsteps to the Orkney Boat’s story. There is wisdom to be gleaned from the stories Searle tells about her fellow stonemasons: highly skilled craftspeople who repair and preserve the fabric of ancient buildings using techniques that have remained unchanged for 800 years.

Above all, this is the story a young woman’s astonishing feat of endurance. Searle was propelled by a myth but the artist and stonemason – who now lives in Scotland – has become something of a legend herself. Should you find yourself walking along the St Olav’s path today, you may hear tell of a mysterious figure who is sometimes seen there, lugging a small piece of Orkney behind her.