Tales from the Trail – Stone

14 Jun Tales from the Trail – Stone

‘Pick up a pebble at the start and take it with you on the journey.’ So say the guidebooks that map you a way to walk from coast to coast across England. Find a small stone from the shore of the Irish Sea at St Bee’s, pop it in your pocket and, when you get to Robin Hood’s Bay, throw it into the North Sea. The symbolism of carrying a piece of the landscape on the journey is rich; any worries about the potential to confuse geologists of the future are easily put aside. 

I’m not sure why I decided not to follow this ritual on my first two journeys coast to coast. Maybe it was just an inclination not to conform; or perhaps an anxious focus on getting started, up onto the cliff above the shore and on my way. On the third journey I did pick up a pebble, a lovely flat one, an elegant ellipse, smooth and lustrous in a deep mud grey. It has little indentations on one side, like the residue of teenage acne on an adult face; on the other side there’s a long shallow line scored diagonally, like a scar left from an accident. I put it in my pocket and took it with me intending to do the usual thing and toss it into the sea at the end of the journey. But I didn’t. For some reason I couldn’t. Instead I picked up another pebble from the shore at Robin Hood’s Bay, a smaller, chunkier one this time, like the petrified lung of a small sea bird, dull, monochrome, with only one little blemish on its matte, unpolished surface, its touch much less smooth than that of its partner from the west. 

On my fourth journey, I picked up another pebble at St Bee’s, an almost perfect oval of pink-beige, the colour and shape of a cameo brooch, the surface mottled like a bird’s egg.  I didn’t throw it away. Nor did I pick up a companion for it at the end of the journey. I have wondered about that, whether it was a way of keeping the journey unfinished, signaling that I’d be back. This year, on my fifth journey coast to coast, I’m carrying a smooth, mottled grey pebble with the tiniest blemishes on one side, minute indentations you can barely see but can feel if you run a finger lightly across them, like hallmarks on silver.

Keeping them feels important. These symbols of the landscape are the artefacts of these journeys, a personal cache of memory, my way-markers.  They spend their days on a window ledge at the top of a small Victorian terraced house in London, no longer marking the passing of geological time or the movement of the tides. Instead, they capture the essence of this great walk and the intimate and expansive glories of walking. I can pick them, up two in the left and one in the right and have a sense of the journey from west to east imparted into the palms of my hands. They reconnect me with those little bits of coastline separated and joined by 196 miles of stunning, stony landscape. And they help me dream.

Stone is the first, the primordial element. It is the start and end of the journey and the narrator of so many stories unfolding each day underfoot. Many of these stories are vivid, etched boldly into the landscape, like those told by the stone walls and the field barns, the sheepfolds and the stepping stones. Others are more subtle, multi-layered, some or all of their meaning hidden away like the strange boundary markers on the moor-tops with their weird faces, or the massive Wainstones perched like prehistoric beasts overlooking the moor. Stories cast in stone but every one of them is a human story too.

Perhaps I will find a companion for this year’s grey pebble when I reach the shore at the end of the journey, a final way-marker because this may be the last time I travel this way. There are other trails to explore after all.