FOLLOWING last month’s cold snap, there was a beautiful satellite image of Scotland that showed the Highlands and Border regions covered in snow; the green Lowlands were spared.
It was plain to see that the central belt, where the majority of Scots, live of course, sits literally between a rock and a hard place. Which brings us to Hettie Judah’s gorgeous book on petromania – stone worship.
How could you resist a work that ends with something she calls a “lexicon of lithic lingo”? Judah tells us about xenoliths and tektite, fantasy cuts and the ecosexual. And check out the index – references to Scotland feature on pages 50-52, 53, 56, 248-9, 282, and 284-5, more than any other country as far as I can see. Rock on …
There are six sections, six themes that deal with: stones and power; sacred stones; stones and stories; stone technology; shapes in stone; and living stones. Each is preceded by extremely pretty illustrations of gems and types of rock, 60 of them.
The volume is thus a bumper book of facts, both educational and fun. Judah admits it can be read “in whichever order you wish”. We discover the various types of amber: Fatty, Foamy, and Cloudy Bastard. Then there’s the Amber Room that once belonged to Peter the Great only to be nicked by the Nazis and now gone missing, perhaps sunk on board the ill-fated MV Wilhelm Gustloff in 1925 or destroyed by the RAF bombing of Konigsberg.
We next head to Lewis to hear about Lewisian gneiss, the oldest group of rocks in Britain, formed around 2.8 billion years ago. We are reminded that 550-300 million years ago Scotland was on a different landmass to England, separated by the Iapetus Ocean only to join up on the supercontinent Pangaea.
As a highly respected art critic, Judah brilliantly describes gneiss: “In some areas it looks as though a calligrapher has taken an ink brush to the stony landscape and patterned it with a rhythmic abundance of strokes, some broad and banded, others rippling like light on a brook.” Which is why many of us pauchled a chunk of the stuff from a Hebridean beach to stick on our mantelpiece back home …
Staying in Scotland, Judah correctly describes Edinburgh as “the site of a revolution of ideas that birthed the modern science of geology”.
We move south to Siccar Point on the Berwickshire coast where we find “the geologists’ Mecca”. This is where James Hutton – a doctor turned geologist – found a formation that was named after him: Hutton’s Unconformity. This is Old Red Sandstone and proof that the Earth was a lot older than previously thought by Biblical timelines.
The Stone of Scone, our Stone of Destiny (soon to re-appear in the headlines given its supposed journey to London for King Charles’s coronation) turns out to be another piece of Old Red Sandstone after scientists had it analysed as recently as 1998.
An even earlier example of stones regarded as sacred are the “fat ladies” of Tarxien in Malta, figures that date back to 3100 BCE.
Judah tells us that 1970s feminist theorists “suggested that Neolithic people were gentle, matriarchal goddess-worshippers living in harmony with the earth: the violent patriarchy that replaced them came with the metal tools and weapons that followed”. A more recent archeologist thinks the statues are un-gendered. The figures are not “she” or “he” but “they”.
We learn, too, of the Mohs Scale that judges hardness, a logarithmic affair where diamond (at the top, scoring 10) can scratch corundum (nine) all the way down to talc (one).
Speaking of diamonds, Judah explores the mythology around appropriated gems and their curse, and how Wilkie Collins was inspired by such stories to write The Moonstone. “Owners of the Tavernier Blue, later known as the Hope, have their throats ripped out by dogs, get themselves guillotined, die “of cocaine and pneumonia”.
As Judah writes: “The suggestion that riches and power are founded in something dark and rotten is irresistible: the enigmatic diamond dazzling as a crystalline emblem both of magnificent wealth and of wickedness.”
Still have Christmas book tokens? I recommend you spend them on Lapidarium.
Lapidarium is published by John Murray Press
