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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. 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.
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.
It is also a treatise on human relationships, to places and to other people; and the meaning these relationships will always hold in a person's life, even when severed. If surfing saints seem slightly more interesting and relatable than the ones traditionally associated with gruesome endings then you are in good company as they are too for Searle, who sets out to find it, uncovering a treasure trove of folklore, as well as connections between boats and stones, as she does so.
Searle’s Stone Will Answer is centred around a 1,300-mile journey she made at the age of 26 from Orkney across Norway and back with a 40kg piece of Orkney stone. By that time, Searle was a qualified stone mason who’d completed a three-year apprenticeship at Lincoln Cathedral. 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. A beautiful memoir, travelogue, and meditation on stone and the transformative power of craft, by young stone mason Beatrice Searle. It can be ubiquitous but often differs in quality within one postcode, within one quarry, within even one section of one quarry.Her writing often strays toward the profound, again in such an easy manner that while it might echo the medieval mystics it is nevertheless rooted in her lived experience as someone who has dragged a forty-kilogram stone along a path for two months. If you have read and enjoyed Alex Woodcock’s King of Dust, published in 2019, and Andrew Ziminski’s The Stonemason, published in 2020, you will probably enjoy Beatrice Searl’s Stone Will Answer. There is speculation as to whether the soul’s weight can be calculable, and whether a 40kg stone might “feel like a perfect balance. We honour Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples' continuous connection to Country, waters, skies and communities. At the age of twenty-six, Beatrice Searle crossed the North sea and walked 500 miles through Southern Norway on a medieval pilgrim path to Nidaros Cathedral, taking with her a 40-kilo stone from the West coast of Orkney.
The analogy with boats runs deep throughout the book, for the stone itself, into which she cuts two footprint depressions, is itself a kind of boat, the Orkney Boat. We also hope it will help the comments section fulfil its promise as a part of Scotland's conversation with itself.
We are making the subscriber-only change to support our valued readers, who tell us they don't want the site cluttered up with irrelevant comments, untruths and abuse. She takes us all further, from ideas of faith in place into seeking for knowing, a travelling in the field. As the rock cycle demonstrates, the natural way of stone is to be in perpetual movement, either oozed from the earth as lava, weathered and deposited to form sedimentary rocks, or otherwise recrystallised. I thoroughly appreciate hearing her sharing this story and all the peculiar intricacies of a peculiarly intricate path.
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