More summer bounty.
This sumptuous reprint of The Pebbles on the Beach by Clarence Ellis has to be this year's Must Have beach accessory, the fold-out cover offering an extended pictorial guide to help you discern your schist from your chert...
It's a gem of a read, a timeless book I wish I'd had as a child, but I can't lay claim to that. It only discovered me in recent years, though in the original version, and it sits in our Cabinet of Curiosities, brim-full with stones and their stories from around the world brought back by the travellers in our family.
It was only a matter of time before I did this...
This new edition of The Pebbles on the Beach, published this week by original publisher Faber, has a foreword by Robert Macfarlane...
'So pebbles became the book that we took as a family when we went pebble-hunting, on the coasts of Britain, wandering waist-bent along the beach, eyes peeled for rough orbs of agate, quartz prisms, purple jasper and elusive amber...it was also the book that accompanied thousands of other families to the beach, lodged on glove boxes, stuffed in rucksacks.'
Our last beach 'pebbling' expedition was to Sandymouth on the north coast of Cornwall in February. It's only thirty miles away but as is always the way we leave home in fine weather and arrive at the coast to grey mist and rain, plus we'd forgotten to check the tide times and it was high tide. Neither of us felt like missing out on the beach walk and it proved to be a revelation in the rain; every other pebble seemed magical and bejewelled and soon our pockets were stuffed with bounty for the outside windowsills.
We have borrowed one whopper (we'll take it back one day) which has the most exquisite ring of Fool's Gold that really did fool us (and would probably have fooled Ross Poldark too) on that wet day.
It now sits on the veranda, outside the kitchen window and glistens and gleams its mother-lode at us on the darkest of grey rainy days. I have now decided that beach pebbling on a wet day in February really is the best thing for cheering spirits dulled by winter.
But now to the real treasure. Five copies of The Pebbles on the Beach are up for winning today and these CAN GO WORLDWIDE. To be in with a chance please do leave a comment here and we'll do the choosing dreckly (as in eventually) as usual.
Entries are now closed on this prize draw.
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