quartzite
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