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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. 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.
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. Describing the surface of the green-grey soapstone of Nidaros Cathedral she notes ‘a rhythmic quilt of axe-marks, their intersecting carbonate veins like fawns streaking through dirty snow’. Following in their footsteps, her stone becomes a talisman of sorts, a bedrock on the move, and an offering to those she meets along the way. But what is really interesting is her analogies from her deep knowledge of stone, of geology and of mythology that provides the bedrock for exploration of contemporary issues - of young love and co dependency to family fissures and body weight issues.Searle has taken this relationship out into the wild, tested it in extreme conditions and come to know, unknow and re-learn her stone, which has forced similar processes upon herself. Her journey has been inspired by the stories she is told of Magnus Erlendsson, the Patron Saint of Orkney, by her stonemasonry college tutor, and a mason’s banker mark found on stones in both Lincoln Cathedral, where Beatrice is an apprentice, and Nidaros Domkirke (Trondheim Cathedral), which starts a conversation between the masons at each. These adverts enable local businesses to get in front of their target audience – the local community. To her credit, Searle doesn’t gloss over her own petulant response: “F*** off then and leave us alone!
She visits Orkney, chooses a stone, carves footprints on it and sets off for Trondheim in Norway dragging it behind her, inviting people she meets along the way on the ancient Gudbrandsdalen pilgrim path to stand in the footprints and experience what they will. The book takes you not just on the authors pilgrimage journey but also into the journey of her life that led to the decision and drive to do something as brave and quirky as dragging a 40kg stone on a trolley over 500km through difficult Norwegian terrain. This is no ordinary stone either but a ‘stippled, leopard-surfaced lozenge’ of Orcadian siltstone, ‘beamy in the hips like a true Yole, Orkney’s traditional clinker-built fishing boat’. The journey is a pilgrimage, despite Searle’s initial reluctance to accept that description (as she says, she hasn’t left home if she’s brought a piece of it with her) but there are multiple journeys in this book. His book ‘King of Dust: Adventures in Forgotten Sculpture’, was published in 2019 by Little Toller Books.But perhaps the book’s most affecting thread concerns her disintegrating relationship with the man she refers to only as T. Weathering via salt deposition is normally the stuff of textbooks but here it is presented in an almost alchemical vividness, with nomadic ‘wandering salt grains’ either wreaking havoc or ‘leaving politely’ depending upon the composition of the stone, ‘causing little harm but thickly crusting on the surface, like a clutch of mushrooms’. We at Penguin Random House Australia acknowledge that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples are the Traditional Custodians and the first storytellers of the lands on which we live and work. It demands a polymath knowledge of everything from art and architecture to chemistry, geology, geometry and more, for those of us drawn to it.
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