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quartzite

ox-eye daisies growing in front of a pale quartzite stone wall

I pull out of the layby and head north. After a hot and sweaty day’s hill walking on Cranstackie and Beinn Spionnaidh and a muggy night in the van, I’m ready for some cold salt water. The flat gold sands of Ceannabeinne beach hover alluringly in my mind as I drive up the side of Loch Eriboll, but after only a few minutes I’m compelled to pull in, as my eye has been caught by the wall at the entrance to Lotte Glob’s sculpture croft. I walk over for a closer inspection. It’s a graceful wall, smooth and neat, and as it slopes evenly down the steep bank on each side of the gateway, its vertical coping stones form an elegant slanting line. Most striking of all, it’s built entirely from quartzite and its soft pink and grey tones give it an almost tender aspect.

I think it’s the most beautiful dry stone wall I’ve ever seen. I’ve been paying a lot more attention to walls since I started learning how to build them a few months ago. I work in Assynt, rebuilding old walls which have fallen into disrepair, so am usually working with Torridonian sandstone and Lewisian gneiss, the two main types of bedrock there. There’s the odd lump of quartzite – which is otherwise mainly found on the area’s mountaintops – but not much, which is a shame as it’s my favourite type of stone. Indeed, it’s the reason I’m up here. Beinn Spionnaidh and Cranstackie are comprised almost entirely of quartzite on their eastern sides, and I’ve had great fun walking and scrambling over their extensive boulderfields.

I get back in the van and continue up the loch. There are a lot of walls here and I notice now that they’re all quartzite, lichened and weathered grey over time, but still subtly luminous and clean in their lines. I’d love to build a wall out of quartzite. It’s such a stylish stone with its crisp edges and rakish diagonals. It’s also the easiest of the rocks I’ve worked with to dress, splitting nicely and yielding lovely sharp wedges.

Maybe one day I’ll get work up here. For now, I’ll get to the beach and soak my tired feet and wonder about the older coasts I have just been walking on. The quartzite here is a type of quartz sandstone which was originally laid down on a sea shore about half a billion years ago. Some of it, the pipe rock of the summits, contains fossilised burrows of ancient sand worms. It’s hard to imagine the age of the stone that passes through my hands and under my feet these days. My impending half century is nothing in comparison. I’m a bubble of froth on an incoming tide, a feather falling from a bird’s wing.

Entrance to Lotte Glob’s croft, Laid, Loch Eriboll, Sutherland
18th June 2023

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heat

It’s like the sultry summer days when I lived in Montreal, heat so thick your skin’s running with sweat,and all your thirsts want slaking. You’re heavy with desire and you want to do something about it but the sun’s pressing in relentlessly and your will is liquefying and really all you can do is wait: wait for the humidity to build, wait for the humidity to break, and then….

First there’s the thunder – the clap, the flash, the weighted brightness – and then comes the rain. You’re standing out in it, lying out in it, feeling it patter all over your body like a thousand darting tongues; touching, tasting, quenching the heat of you, until you sigh and subside and gratefully dissolve.

Those were the days, and this is one now, although in this case the thunder is a low rumble rather than a violent crash, and the sky isn’t dense purple but medium-grey, and the rain isn’t filling the hot street with warmed flooding water: this is a Scottish summer, more temperate in all its aspects. Yet still the heat comes in, still the rain insists.

Lochinver, Assynt, Scotland
13th June 2023

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heartening

I’ve been corrupted.

Yesterday I walked up a hill, as I often do, following a burbling burn with pretty pools and falls, and up onto a rounded top covered in boulders of shattered blue-grey quartzite. Behind me the western mountains rose from the sea like petrified waves and ahead of me eastern Sutherland spread out in all its low and dappled brown glory. Everything was gleaming in the clear summer sun – the rocks, the lochs, the distant sea – but all I could see were good builders (large and squareish with clean faces), fine pins (long and slender) and some excellent (tapered and triangular) wedges.

The summit itself was covered in hefty slabs, perfect for making cheekends, and previous hillwalkers had used some of them to make a bench, a sound construction, far better built than the low stone wall around the trig point which looked distinctly shoogly. I secured one end of the wall with a handy wedge, sat on it and ate my lunch, then slept heavily for a while on the stone bench in the sun.

“Have you started dreaming of stones yet?,” the waller who is training me asked recently. I had. And now even my waking thoughts are stone-shaped: sometimes rough, sometimes smooth but substantial and with a satisfying heft. Even the little thoughts have their uses, like the hearting in a wall, supporting and securing those of larger dimensions. Nothing is wasted.

I think about this as the mountain carries me along, this heightened attunement to rock. It’s not only in my mind but my hands too. I can almost feel the stones that I think about: their grain and texture, their corners and edges, their linear or complex forms (the even grain of Torridonian sandstone, the sheer faces of Cambrian quartzite, the lumpy curves of Lewisian gneiss).

I’m being changed by them, and it’s disorientating, as change often is. But as I recover from the fragility of a brain injury, I sense that working with stone is good for me, that it’s therapeutic in some way. In lifting the stones, handling the stones, placing the stones, I’m being consolidated. I’m being built up. I’m being heartened.

long slender pale stone embedded in dry grass pointing towards distant blue lochs and hills

Ben Hee, Sutherland, Scotland
4th June 2023

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release

I felt the lift as it flew from my hands; not just the release of its warm weight but an actual lift, as if I too was leaping from a pair of palms held out an upstairs window and swooping swiftly over the steeply terraced rooftops to settle on an outer branch of the great oak tree which rises above the village a couple of streets away. As I watched it land, it was as if the arm of the oak reached out to me too, across the stretching gulf of air, the jackdaw’s sudden flight stitching me to it with an invisible thread.

I don’t know how it had got in but when I came upstairs I heard it beating frantically against the closed window. I opened a pane for it but, not understanding my commands to fly “up” to the opening, it continued to jump and flap energetically against the lower glass, occasionally fixing me with its pale bright eye. Such a smart bird and so self-possessed. As I placed my hands around its back, it folded in its wings and, as I lifted it over the window frame and opened my hands, it flew out in one fluid motion, as if the holding and release were one movement, as if I and the bird – for one mutual moment – were equally graceful, equally light.

Pontycymer, Glamorgan, South Wales
4th April 2023