It demands a polymath knowledge of everything from art and architecture to chemistry, geology, geometry and more, for those of us drawn to it. Parallel to these discoveries is another factor, the dawning realisation that as a stonemason, serving her apprenticeship at Lincoln Cathedral, her work might be ‘upholding the unnatural stasis of a startling and shifting material’. She had recently completed her masonry training at Lincoln Cathedral and become fascinated with the mysterious footprint stones of Scandinavia, Northern Europe and the ancient Greco-Roman world; stones closely associated with travellers, saints and the inauguration of Kings.

A beautiful memoir, travelogue, and meditation on stone and the transformative power of craft, by young stone mason Beatrice Searle. 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’. To her credit, Searle doesn’t gloss over her own petulant response: “F*** off then and leave us alone! The Oxford Literary Festival was a special opportunity for me and certainly one of the highlights of my career – it was an honour I will never forget. It can be ubiquitous but often differs in quality within one postcode, within one quarry, within even one section of one quarry.There is wisdom to be gleaned from the stories Searle tells about her fellow stonemasons: highly skilled craftspeople who repair and preserve the fabric of ancient buildings using techniques that have remained unchanged for 800 years. It is also a treatise on human relationships, to places and to other people; and the meaning these relationships will always hold in a person's life, even when severed. I thoroughly appreciate hearing her sharing this story and all the peculiar intricacies of a peculiarly intricate path.

If surfing saints seem slightly more interesting and relatable than the ones traditionally associated with gruesome endings then you are in good company as they are too for Searle, who sets out to find it, uncovering a treasure trove of folklore, as well as connections between boats and stones, as she does so. Searle seamlessly contemplates the meaning of craft, ancient myths, the mutability of stone and the transformations within her own life. Footprint stones” such as those found at Dunadd and Kintyre are thought to have once been used in ancient rituals by kings and travellers, and part of Searle’s mission involved inviting people she met on her journey to “draw the wisdom of forebears” from their contact with the rock. 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.Weaving between the joyful trusting determination of a singular intelligent and interested little girl, in her adulthood she draws her into this story so tenderly, whilst walking into the landscape of facing the peculiar monolithic impressions we live amongst. 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. Stone Will Answer is an unusual adventure story of resilience and homecoming, of weight and motion, of rediscovering love and faith, and of journeys practical, spiritual and geological. 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’.

For many of us the path to finding stonemasonry as a profession and learning how to work stone is, like Searle’s, circuitous, part-luck, part-dogged determination and part the generosity of strangers recognising a kindred soul.The chance discovery in a book, given to her by a stonemasonry tutor, of ‘a monochrome photograph of a knobbly and scratched stone boulder, containing two carved footprints’ spurs her on to investigate the phenomena of ‘footprint stones’. How dare you ask to come along, corrupting the beautiful simplicity of our journey and then be f***ing awful when it gets tough! His book ‘King of Dust: Adventures in Forgotten Sculpture’, was published in 2019 by Little Toller Books. There is the journey of introducing the stone to other people, which sounds simple but can be just as fraught as moving the thing.