Stone Will Answer - A Journey Guided by Craft, Myth and Geology

A beautiful memoir, travelogue and meditation on stone by artist and stone mason Beatrice Searle.

'Extraordinary' Guardian
‘A magnificent book’ Alex Woodcock
‘Exceptional’ Kerri Andrews
‘Luminous’ Spectator

At the age of twenty-six, artist and Cathedral stonemason Beatrice Searle crossed the North Sea and walked 500 miles along a medieval pilgrim path through Southern Norway, taking with her a 40-kilogram Orcadian stone.

Fascinated with the mysterious footprint stones of Northern Europe and the ancient Greco-Roman world, stones closely associated with travellers, saints and the inauguration of Kings, she follows in their footsteps as her stone becomes a talisman, a bedrock and an offering to those she meets along the way.

Stone Will Answer is an unusual adventure story of journeys practical, spiritual and geological, of weight and motion, and an insight into a beguiling craft.

Praise:

"A moving testimony to the power of art, of finding the extraordinary in the everyday and acting upon your instinct. To walk with Searle in its pages is to experience stone within a new light... as a part-knowable, ever-shifting medium in the process of slow but perpetual change, one long work-in-progress." - Alex Woodcock, Caught by the River

"Illuminating... I was quickly taken in by Beatrice Searle's distinctive voice, and by the end I couldn't help but feel very differently about stones, rootedness, belonging, and indeed what walking might mean. Beatrice's story is exceptional, and she is an exceptional story teller." - Kerri Andrews, author of Wandering: A History of Women Walking